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Updated: September 9, 2025
To have lifted my head would have meant the billet for a bullet. So there I had to lie soaked through to the skin, and before I had been there twenty minutes I was literally lying in water. The German fusillade seemed interminable. Suddenly with a roar the Belgian guns spoke. About fifty shells were fired, and gradually the rifle-fire ceased.
Unable to sleep well, I heard, just about or before dawn, a distant drumming, like the noise of rain on the window, but recognised immediately as distant rifle-fire. Morning broke, cheerless and wet. I asked if any one had heard firing during the night, but no one near me had.
Where the British infantry lay was such a lake of flame and din that the very earth seemed to burst apart; yet the answering rifle-fire was steady steady as the roll of drums. Then we truly saw one red light, and "EK!" said we all at once. EK means ONE, sahib, but it sounded like the opening of a breech-block. "Mount!" ordered Colonel Kirby, and we mounted.
We were within rifle-fire, though at long range. Now and then a very peculiar little shell was thrown at us. One went straight through a tent, but we could not find it afterwards. It was a shell like a viper. I left the Manchesters putting up barbed-wire entanglements to increase their defence, and came back to try to find another runner.
Some one of the crater, presumably Gunga Dass, must have shot him with his own gun the gun that fitted the brown cartridges. He had never attempted to escape in the face of the rifle-fire from the boat. I pushed the corpse out hastily, and saw it sink from sight literally in a few seconds. I shuddered as I watched. In a dazed, half-conscious way I turned to peruse the notebook.
And so long as he can command the nerve to remain behind this barricade and maintain a steady rifle-fire upon that narrow gap through which, as you may see, only one man can pass at a time he will be absolutely safe. Well, thank God, we are not likely to need its protection, for we ought to be at sea on the third evening from now."
That is why they have taken to mining most audacious mining, carried on under the noses of the French defenders. If you come here at night, and remain until one of those curious lulls in the rifle-fire suddenly begins, you will distinctly hear this curious tapping of picks and shovels, which means the preparation of a gallery.
In a wood a short distance away it was evident that our patrols were in contact with the Huns. Volley after volley of rifle-fire rang out, and now and then a burst from the machine-guns. A horseman was heading straight for me. Was he British or Hun? In a few minutes I could see he was one of our men evidently a dispatch-rider. He swept down into a hollow, then up the road into the village.
'Listen! cried Dick. From somewhere on the banks of the river there was the sound of rifle-fire, and the rat-tat-tat-tat of machine-guns, like the rattle of riveters at work on a steel structure. Following a tow-path which ran by the river, they appeared to be entering a zone of comparative quiet.
It was a counter-attack by masses of men crawling up to the crest from the reverse side and trying to get the Scots out of the slopes below. But the men of the 15th Division answered by volleys of rifle-fire, machine-gun fire, and bombs. They held on in spite of dead and wounded men thinning out their fighting strength.
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