Page:War, the Liberator (1918).djvu/161

 hurting his men, and, as he lugged the groaning MacNeil into the slight cover of the old trench, with an artistic delight in the thing he was doing, he seemed to be regarding himself from the front stalls of a gigantic theatre and applauding a fine piece of acting. He wouldn’t get through it, and nobody would know, but he was doing the right thing, and painting a good picture. The esthetic joy of it buoyed him up as he helped Sergeant Godstone along with the other man; then went back to the parapet where Charles and Sergeant Macdonald were still struggling with the boy. He looked down at the shrunken face.

“I believe we’ll have to leave him, Charles,” he said, “‘he’s a dying man.”

Charlie MacRae looked up with his hand on the boy’s heart.

“No, he isn’t,” he said; “he’s dead.”

They rose and left him lying there on the German parapet; from the right as they ran for the old trench, came the clatter of a machine-gun.

The next few minutes seemed to MacTaggart interminable hours filled with the bursting of shells and the shrieks of the wounded men, as he pulled them along. Now he was lugging at one, now at the other, and now running back with Macdonald, screaming hysterical curses, to throw bombs into the Bosche