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But, before I give you Monty's last word, let me tell you where I am at this moment. It is early evening, and I am writing these closing lines, in which I bid you farewell, sitting on the floor of my kennel-like dug-out in a Belgian trench. There is a most glorious bombardment going on overhead.
Occasional bullets, for instance, kept plugging into the ground beside Headquarters' dug-out. One of these imbedded itself in a box which was being carried in by an orderly. After that anybody passing in or out moved, as the Colonel described it, with a well assumed air of having something to do in a hurry.
He dashed tirelessly north, south, east, west, towards whichever point of the compass he heard a gun firing or a shell exploding. "I'm sure that dog's mad," commented the colonel when we breakfasted at 7 A.M. "I watched him from my dug-out for three-quarters of an hour after the barrage started. He passed the opening eighty times, then I got tired of counting.
Our wash sends their dug-out canoe bobbling alongside their raft, and splashes over and between the logs, and the raftsmen have to bustle to keep their herd together, and we pass, and they go and dream, of well I don't know what; that's the worst of being only a visitor in a country without the language, you can only guess what the people think by their expressions.
His big, healthy, bearded face looked out from the narrow entrance of the stairs which gave access to the dug-out, and for a while he grinned, a friendly, encouraging grin, at our hero.
And when his section laughed at him for his fears he merely shrugged his shoulders, and sat gazing into the brazier's glow. The day wore quietly on, and I had forgotten all about Williams and his gloomy prophecies when a corporal came along to my dug-out. "Williams has been hit by a bomb, sir," he said, "and is nearly done for."
Fortunately, it was a glancing shot, but the force with which it struck him was almost sufficient to knock him off his feet. "I'm not hurt at all," said he as his men crowded about him, "but I shall have to put a patch on my coat when I get back to the post. I say, there," he shouted, addressing himself to the inmates of the dug-out, "was there anybody hurt in there? I thought I heard a yell."
I visited his dug-out, and he let me look at his books and Punch and a month-old Illustrated London News, or so. I came to admire him for his simplicity and for his devotion to his men. Every Sunday he held Mass in the trenches of the firing-line, and he never had the least fear of going up. A splendid little man, always cheerful, always looking after his "flock."
"With the double company of French and British, there was rather a tight squeeze in the shelters, wonderfully commodious as they were. "Now this," said Corporal Flannigan, "is what I call something like a dug-out." He looked appreciatively round the square, smooth-walled chamber and up the steps to the small opening which gave admittance to it. "Good dodge, too, this sinking it deep underground.
Rifles cracked along the line while those sappers and patrols sent out by the enemy who hardly believed life still possible in the shattered trenches were shot down or driven back to cover. Henri then, peering over the trench, turned of a sudden and rushed to the entrance of the dug-out. "Come!" he shouted.
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