"Shrap., and I've lost my helmet!" he exclaimed. "I'll lose my head next, if I haven't done so already. By gum, I'm out of my tracks!"
He stopped and surveyed his surroundings. He was now quite alone. Even the dead and wounded were no longer in evidence. Smoke limited his range of vision to a distance of less than a hundred yards. Beyond, a few gaunt stumps of trees loomed through the pungent vapour like distorted shadows. With the sun completely obscured, he had no means of ascertaining his direction. For all he knew he might have followed a semicircular course. The sound of the guns helped him not at all. Which were the hostile and which the British artillery was a question he was unable to answer.
A whiff of nauseating gas drifted across his path. His right hand sought his anti-gas mask. It had vanished. Only a portion of one of the straps remained; it had been completely severed by a bullet.
And now another difficulty arose. The deadly gas used by the Huns, having a density greater than air, has a tendency to fill the hollows and leave the high ground comparatively clear. On Malcolm's front the ground rose gradually to a height of about twenty feet. While it might afford protection from the noxious vapour, the ridge was certainly open to rifle-fire. Nor could Carr understand why, in a temporarily-deserted expanse, there should be such a persistent hail of machine-gun fire.
"Better to risk a bullet than a dose of gas," decided the rifleman, and with this intention he breasted the slope as rapidly as his sprained ankle would allow.
"Might get a sight of the village, too," he soliloquized as he neared the summit of the ridge.
Something struck him sharply on the hip. Mechanically he glanced down. The butt of his slung rifle was splintered, the brass heel-plate curiously twisted. A piece of shell, which otherwise would have inflicted a dangerous if not mortal wound, had been intercepted by the rifle.
"A miss is as good as a mile," he remarked to himself.
The sensation akin to panic had passed. A kind of blind fatalism gripped him.
"If I'm booked to be plugged it's no use getting flurried over it," he continued, talking aloud. His voice seemed strange and distant, but for want of someone with whom to converse it afforded him a slight sense of companionship--an audible indication that he was still alive. "On the other hand, if my number isn't up, why worry? All the same, I should like to know how far I'm away from Messines."