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"Yes, it rolled into the sap, and I've had it put into the fire-trench. I'm taking it back to blow it up. I think it's a percussion fuse, but it seems fairly safe. I've sent for a stretcher to carry it on." "Let's go and have a look at it." The two officers walked down the sap and back into the trench, and started to investigate with a professional eye the object lying on the fire-step.
Strapped to his back by a sort of harness was a contrivance which looked like a rude armchair with the legs cut off. His comrades hoisted the dead man onto the back of the live man, and with a rope took a few turns about the bodies of both. As we made our slow way back to the fire-trench, and so to the rear, there stumbled at our heels the grunting porter with his ghastly burden.
Twenty yards from the turn a mass of barbed wire crossed the trench above his head, the barbed wire which ran in front of the support line. For it is not only the fire-trench that is wired each line behind is plentifully supplied with this beautiful vegetable growth. The mist had cleared away, and the morning sun was blazing down from a cloudless sky, as he reached the front trench.
It was at that particular period that Henri and Jules and a dozen or more of their comrades found themselves in a portion of the fire-trench cut off from their comrades, who had retreated, and already almost surrounded by Germans. "It's all up! We are surrounded! We are captured!
In the fire-trench or perhaps it would be more correct to call it the water-trench life may be short, and is seldom merry; but it is not often dull. For one thing, we are never idle. A Boche trench-mortar knocks down several yards of your parapet. Straightway your machine-gunners are called up, to cover the gap until darkness falls and the gaping wound can be stanched with fresh sandbags.
Crouching in the depths of a dug-out, some thirty feet below the surface, a dug-out which shook and quivered as shells rained above it, Henri's comrades of the platoon smoked grimly, while that young fellow himself, once a Paris elegant, crouched in what was left of a fire-trench, now a mere shattered pit and peered somewhat anxiously towards the open.
A steady stream of sandbags filled with the result of their labours came up the shaft down which the pipe from the bellows stretched into the darkness sandbags which must be taken somewhere and emptied, or used to revet a bit of trench which needed repair. To right and left there stretched the fire-trench twisting and turning, traversed and recessed just one small bit of the edge of British land.
Warmly and extensively apostrophizing the originators of this nocturnal expedition, they gathered up their rifles, bandoliers and water-bottles and wandered protestingly off uphill. Arrived in the front fire-trench, they were directed to set about roofing bomb-proof dug-outs, in place of another party which was too tired to continue.
The sun rises high and the beams strike with comforting warmth even into the fire-trench where we gather in groups to catch its every glint. We feel good on such a morning. We clean up a bit, for things are quiet that is, fairly quiet. Only a few shells are flying, there is little or no rifle fire and nobody is getting killed, nobody is even getting plugged. The whole long day passes quietly.
Following the direction of the arrows on signs printed in both French and Russian, we at last reached the fire-trench, where dim figures looking strangely mediæval in their steel helmets, crouched motionless, peering out along their rifle-barrels into the eerie darkness of No Man's Land.
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