He was interrupted by the arrival of a group of German shells on and
about the section of trench they were in. One burst on the rear lip of
the trench, spattering earth and bullets about them and leaving a
choking reek swirling and eddying along the trench. There was silence
for an instant, and then an officer's voice called from the near
traverse. "Is anybody hit there!" A sergeant shouted back "No, sir,"
and was immediately remonstrated with by an indignant private busily
engaged in scraping the remains of a mud clod from his eye.

"You might wait a minute, Sergeant," he said, "afore you reports no
casualties, just to give us time to look round and count if all our
limbs is left on. And I've serious doubts at this minute whether my eye
is in its right place or bulging out the back o' my head; anyway, it
feels as if an eight-inch Krupp had bumped fair into it."

When the explosion came, Toffee Everton had instinctively ducked and
crouched, but he noticed that Halliday never moved or gave a sign of
the nearness of any danger. Toffee remarked this to him.

"And I don't see," he confessed, "where that fits in with this
hand- and heart-shaking o' yours."

Halliday looked at him curiously.

"If that was the worst," he said, "I could stand it. It isn't. It isn't
the beginning of the least of the worst. If it had fell in the trench,
now, and mucked up half a dozen men, there'd have been something to
squeal about. That's the sort o' thing that breaks a man up--your own
mates that was talking to you a minute afore, ripped to bits and torn