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"Pass it down to Sergeant H that Sergeant S l wishes him the top o' the mornin'," said my sergeant. But Sergeant H , who was in charge of the company's Lewis-guns, and had been stationed in the next fire-trench, was at present groping his way to safety with a lump of shrapnel in his back. An occasional shell sang one way or the other. Otherwise all was quiet. We passed down the remains of the rum.
The recumbent Samuel agrees. "This little 'oiler is a bit of all right," he remarks. "When you've done strarfin' that bully-beef, 'and it over, ole man!" He leans his head back upon the lip of the shell-hole, and gazes pensively at the notice-board six feet away. It says: Here is another cross-roads, a good mile farther forward and less than a hundred yards behind the fire-trench. It is dawn.
Our fire-trench here runs round the angle of an orchard, which brings it uncomfortably close to the Germans. "It may only be a listening-post," explains Simson to his bombers, "with one or two men in it. On the other hand, they may be collecting a party to rush us. There are some big shell-craters there, and they may be using one of them as a saphead.
Understand, my comrade, that shell-fire is not all very pleasant, and there are times when a man must sit in the fire-trench, crouching at the bottom, whilst they rain all round him, some bursting in the trench and shattering the traverses, some thumping pits behind or in front big enough for a platoon to camp in, and others blowing in the parapets, and smothering the fellows behind them.
When he came to the trenches, at last, and filed down the narrow communication-trench and into his Company's appointed position in the deep ditch with a narrow platform along its front that was the forward fire-trench, he remembered with unpleasant clearness that instinctive start and thought of taking cover.
Captain Blaikie stands leaning against a traverse in the fire-trench, superintending the return of a party from picket duty. They file in, sleepy and dishevelled, through an archway in the parapet, on their way to dug-outs and repose. The last man in the procession is Bobby Little, who has been in charge all night.
The course of instruction was somewhat as follows. In the first place I gave a short lecture on the mechanism of the grenade and methods of firing it. Then the party of ten was split into two squads and firing practice took place. The men were trained to fire kneeling and lying, behind cover and without, and also out of a deep fire-trench. I was greatly assisted by Sergt.
It was too dangerous to attempt to bury the dead who were in the fire-trench. Most of them had already been buried by shells. For them and for the dead in the support trenches interred by their living comrades, Niven recited such portions as he could recall of the Church of England service for the dead recited them with a tight throat.
The fire-trench was almost empty, and in many cases the real defenders of the French line were men with machine guns, hidden in dug-outs at some distance from the photographed positions at which the German gunners aimed. The batteries of light guns, which the French handled with the flexibility and continuity of fire of Maxims, were also concealed in widely scattered positions.
When he awoke it was broad daylight, and the tornado of his last sleepy moments of consciousness had diminished to the usual spasmodic rifle reports. He stood up, ruefully rubbed the spots where ammunition pouches had made dents in his person, stepped over his still sleeping cobbers and crawled through the rabbit-hole entrance into the fire-trench.
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