“I woke up pretty quick,” said one of them, “and thought the house had fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I’m a heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My mother bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. ‘Perhaps you’ll be down for breakfast now,’ she said. But a shell is better⁠—as a knocker-up. I didn’t stop to dress.”

Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of his escape.

“ K. ’s men” had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months of hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not appeal humorously to sensitive men.

“Any room for us there?” asked one of these bronzed fellows as he marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices of French graves rose above the churchyard wall.