The center of the fighting seemed to have passed beyond the group of moving picture boys by this time.  Blake, Charlie and Drew turned to where Joe lay and began scraping the dirt from him.

He stirred uneasily while they were doing this, and murmured: 

“It’s all right.  Put in another reel.”

“Touched on the head,” said the soldier.  “We’d better get him back of the lines where he can see a doctor.  Your machine got a touch of it, too.”

Anderson hurried over to the overturned camera.  A quick examination showed him that it had suffered no more damage than the broken support.

“It’s all right,” he announced.  “Not even light-struck, I guess.  I’ll take this and the boxes of film,” and he shouldered his burden.

“Well, I’ll take your bunkie—­guess I can manage to carry him better than you, for we’ve had practice in that—­and you can shoulder the other picture machine,” said Drew, as he moved over to Joe.  “We won’t wait for the stretcher-men.  They won’t be along for some time if this keeps up.  Come on now.”

“But can you manage, hurt as you are?” asked Blake.

“Oh, sure!  Mine’s only a scratch.  Wait, I’ll give myself a little first aid and then I’ll be all right.”

With the help of Blake the soldier disinfected his wound with a liquid he took from his field kit, and then, having bound a bandage around his head, he picked up the still unconscious Joe and started back with him to the rear trenches.

They had to make a detour to avoid some of the German fire, which was still hot in sections, but finally managed to get to a place of comparative safety.  Here they were met by a party of ambulance men, and Joe was placed on a stretcher and taken to a first dressing station.

Meanwhile, Anderson put the cameras with their valuable reels of film in a bomb-proof structure.

“Is he badly hurt?” asked Blake anxiously of the surgeon.

“I hope not.  In fact, I think not,” was the reassuring answer of the American army surgeon.  “He has been shocked, and there is a bad bruise on one side, where he seems to have been struck by a stone thrown by the exploding shell.  But a few days’ rest will bring him around all right.  Pretty close call, was it?”

“Oh, it might have been worse,” answered Drew, whose wound had also been attended to.  “It was just a chance shot.”

“Well, I don’t know that it makes an awful lot of difference whether it’s a chance shot or one that is aimed at you, as long as it hits,” said the surgeon.  “However, you are luckily out of it.  How does it seem, to be under fire?” he asked Blake.

“Well, I can’t say I fancy it as a steady diet, and yet it wasn’t quite as bad as I expected.  And we got the pictures all right.”

“That’s good!” the surgeon said.  “Well, your friend will be all right.  He’s coming around nicely now,” for Joe was coming out of the stupor caused by the blow on the head from a clod of earth.