Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/189

Rh and shoulders. Five minutes ago that form must have been alert at sentinel duty on the parapet. Now some one had taken his place, and he lay, exactly the colour of the clay, except for his boots. They were too black, too heavy, the stillest things you have ever seen. Feet held so ought to twitch occasionally. There was an appeal about the multitude of studs on the soles, designed to keep that man, who would never do anything again, from slipping.

We knew why he lay there. A grenade had come in from just such a machine as we had been inspecting. He lay there in order that the other fellow shouldn't feel too much at ease. And how many more lay like him the length of the trenches that morning with studded boots outstretched in a sickening stolidity!

We walked neither slower nor faster. We didn't vary our talk about the catapult we had just seen, about the further clever tricks of trench war. fare designed to keep the other fellow from feeling too much at ease. I remember Williams mentioned the whiz-bang— too jocular a name for a shell that drops in and performs multiple explosions and the trench mortar which tumbles a huge and awkward ball on the opposite parapet, where it either kills directly or buries men alive because of the blasting explosive it carries.