To add to the general hopelessness, their own artillery, believing them all dead, opened fire on the building. They moved their wounded to the cellar and kept on fighting.
At eight o'clock that night Cecil's right arm was hanging helpless, and the building was burning merrily. There were five of them left. They fixed bayonets and charged the open door.
When the boy opened his eyes he was lying in six inches of manure in a box car. One of his men was standing over him, keeping him from being trampled on. There was no air and no water. The ammonia fumes from the manure were stifling.
The car lurched and jolted along. Cecil opened his eyes now and then, and at first he begged for water. When he found there was none he lay still. The men hammered on the door and called for air. They made frantic, useless rushes at the closed and barred door. Except Cecil, all were standing. They were herded like cattle, and there was no room to lie or sit.
He lay there, drugged by weakness. He felt quite sure that he was dying, and death was not so bad. He voiced this feebly to the man who stood over him.
"It's not so bad," he said.
"The hell it's not!" said the man.
For the time Edith was effaced from his mind. He remembered the wounded men left in the cellar with the building burning over them. That, and days at home, long before the war.
Once he said "Mother." The soldier who was now standing astride of him, the better to keep off the crowding men, thought he was asking for water again.