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“Are those men all dead?”

“No. Some are too badly wounded to move. They will bring them in in the dark.”

“What will the tanks do now?”

“They’ll go home if they’re lucky.”

But one of them was already unlucky. In the pine woods a black dirty column of smoke began to rise and was then blown sideways by the wind. Soon it was a rolling black cloud and in the greasy black smoke you could see the red flames. There was an explosion and a billowing of white smoke and then the black smoke rolled higher; but from a wider base.

“That’s a tank,” I said. “Burning.”

We stood and watched. Through the glasses you could see two men get out of an angle of the trench and start up a slant of the hill carrying a stretcher. They seemed to move slowly and ploddingly. As you watched the man in front sank onto his knees and then sat down. The man behind had dropped to the ground. He crawled forward. Then with his arm under the first man’s shoulder he started to crawl, dragging him toward the trench. Then he stopped moving and you saw that he was lying flat on his face. They both lay there not moving now.

They had stopped shelling the house and it was quiet now. The big farmhouse and walled court showed clear and yellow against the green hillside that was scarred white with the dirt where the strong points had been fortified and the communication trenches dug. There was smoke from small fires rising now over the hillside where men were cooking. And up the slope toward the big farmhouse lay the casualties of the attack like many scattered bundles on the green slope. The tank was burning black and greasy in the trees.

“It’s horrible,” the girl said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. It’s really horrible.”

“It always has been.”

“Don’t you hate it?”

“I hate it and I always have hated it. But when you have to do it you ought to know how. That was a frontal attack. They are just murder.”

“Are there other ways to attack?”

“Oh sure. Lots of them. But you have to have knowledge and discipline and trained squad and section leaders. And most of all you ought to have surprise.”

“It makes now too dark to work,” Johnny said putting the cap over his telephoto lens. “Hello you old lice. Now we go home to the hotel. Today we work pretty good.”

“Yes,” said the other one. “Today we have got something very good. It is too dom bad the attack is no good. Is better not to think about it. Sometime we film a successful attack. Only always with a successful attack it rains or snows.”

“I don’t want to see any more ever,” the girl said. “I’ve seen it now. Nothing would ever make me see it for curiosity or to make money writing about it. Those are men as we are. Look at them there on that hillside.”

“You are not men,” said Johnny. “You are a womans. Don’t make a confusion.”

“Comes now the steel hat man,” said the other looking out of the window. “Comes now with much dignity. I wish I had bomb to throw to make suddenly a surprise.”

We were packing up the cameras and equipment when the steel-hatted Authority came in.

“Hullo,” he said. “Did you make some good pictures? I have a car in one of the back streets to take you home, Elizabeth.”

“I’m going home with Edwin Henry,” the girl said.

“Did the wind die down?” I asked him conversationally.

He let that go by and said to the girl, “You won’t come?”

“No,” she said. “We are all going home together.”

“I’ll see you at the Club tonight,” he said to me very pleasantly.

“You don’t belong to the Club any more,” I told him, speaking as nearly English as I could.

We all started down the stairs together, being very careful about the holes in the marble, and walking over and around the new damage. It seemed a very long stairway. I picked up a brass nose-cap flattened and plaster marked at the end and handed it to the girl called Elizabeth.

“I don’t want it,” she said and at the doorway we all stopped and let the steel-hatted man go on ahead alone. He walked with great dignity across the part of the street where you were sometimes fired on