"Good," said the C.O. "I'm very sorry he's got to go, for he's a jolly good officer. However, it can't be helped. Have another drink, Doc."
It is bad policy to refuse the offer of a senior officer, and the M.O. was a man with a thirst, so he helped himself with liberality. Before he had raised the glass to his lips, the sudden roar of many bursting shells caused him to jump to his feet. "Hell!" he growled. "Another hate. More dirty work at the cross roads." And he hurried off to the little dug-out that served him as a dressing station, his beloved drink standing untouched on the table.
Meanwhile, Roger Dymond crouched up against the parapet, and listened to the explosions all around him. "Oil cans" and "Minnewerfer" bombs came hurtling through the air, "Crumps" burst with great clouds of black smoke, bits of "Whizz-bangs" went buzzing past and buried themselves deep in the ground. Roger Dymond tried to light his cigarette, but his hand shook so that he could hardly hold the match, and he threw it away in fear that the men would see how he trembled.
Thousands of people have tried to describe the noise of a shell, but no man can know what it is like unless he can put himself into a trench to hear the original thing. There is the metallic roar of waves breaking just before the rain, there is the whistle of wind through the trees, there is the rumble of a huge traction engine, and there is the sharp back-fire of a motor car. With each different sinister noise, Roger Dymond felt his hold over himself gradually going ... going....
Next to him in the trench crouched Newman, a soldier who had been in his platoon in the old days when they tramped, sweating and half-dead, along the broiling roads towards Paris.
"They'm a blasted lot too free with their iron crosses and other souvenirs," growled that excellent fellow. "I'd rather be fighting them 'and to 'and like we did in that there churchyard near Le Cateau, wouldn't you, sir?"
Dymond smiled sickly assent, and Newman, being an old soldier, knew what was the matter with his captain. He watched him as, bit by bit, his nerve gave way, but he dared not suggest that Dymond should "go sick," and he did the only thing that could be done under the circumstances—he talked as he had never talked before.
"Gawd!" he said after a long monologue that was meant to bring distraction from the noise of the inferno. "I wish as 'ow we was a bit closer to the devils so that they couldn't shell us. I'd like to get me 'and round some blighter's ugly neck, too."
A second later a trench-mortar bomb came hurtling down through the air, and fell on the parados near the two men. There was a pause, then an awful explosion, which hurled Dymond to the ground, and, as he fell, Newman's words seemed to run through his head: "I wish as 'ow we was a bit closer to the devils so that they couldn't shell us." He was aware of a moment's acute terror, then something in his brain seemed to snap and everything that followed was vague, for Captain Roger Dymond went mad.
He remembered clambering out of the trench to get so close to the Huns that they could not shell him; he remembered running—everybody running, his own men running with him, and the Germans running from him; he had a vague recollection of making his way down a long bit of strange trench, brandishing an entrenching tool that he had picked up somewhere; then there was a great flash and an awful pain, and all was over—the shelling was over at last.