"Exactly."
"Heard from your family?"
"Sure."
"Well—"
They relapsed into silence again. By and by they ate a meal of cold food, supplemented by rank, steaming coffee. Then they slept. Before dawn Hugo woke feeling like a man in the mouth of a volcano that had commenced to erupt. The universe was shaking. The walls of the dug-out were molting chunks of earth. The scream and burst of shells were constant. He heard Shayne's voice above the din, issuing orders in French. Their batteries were to be phoned. A protective counter-fire. A barrage in readiness in case of attack, which seemed imminent. Larger shells drowned the voice. Hugo rose and stood beside Shayne.
"Coming over?"
"Coming over."
A shapeless face spoke in the gloom. The voice panted. "We must get out of here, my lieutenant. They are smashing in the dug-out." A methodical scramble to the orifice. Hell was rampaging in the trench. The shells fell everywhere. Shayne shook his head. It was neither light nor dark. The incessant blinding fire did not make things visible except for fragments of time and in fantastic perspectives. Things belched and boomed and smashed the earth and whistled and howled. It was impossible to see how life could exist in that caldron, and yet men stood calmly all along the line. A few of them, here and there, were obliterated.
The red sky in the southeast became redder with the rising sun. Hugo remained close to the wall. It was no novelty for him to be under shell fire. But at such times he felt the need of a caution with which he could ordinarily dispense. If one of the steel cylinders found him, even his mighty frame might not contain itself. Even he might be rent asunder. Shayne saw him and smiled. Twenty yards away a geyser of fire sprayed the heavens. Ten feet away a fragment of shell lashed down a pile of sand-bags. Shayne's smile widened. Hugo returned it.
Then red fury enveloped the two men. Hugo was crushed ferociously against the wall and liberated in the same second. He fell forward, his ears singing and his head dizzy. He lay there, aching. Dark red stains flowed over his face from his nose and ears. Painfully he stood up. A soldier was watching him from a distance with alarmed eyes. Hugo stepped. He found that locomotion was possible. The bedlam increased. It brought a sort of madness. He remembered Shayne. He searched in the smoking, stinking muck. He found the shoulders and part of Shayne's head. He picked them up in his hands, disregarding the butchered ends of the raw gobbet. White electricity crackled in his head.