III

IIIIN THE WOODTheattack on the wood had begun soon after dawn, and it was no more than 8 a.m. when the Corporal was dropped badly wounded in the advance line of the attack where it had penetrated about four hundred yards into the wood. But it was well into afternoon before he sufficiently woke to his surroundings to understand where he was or what had happened, and when he did so he found the realisation sufficiently unpleasant. It was plain from several indications—the direction from which the shells bursting in his vicinity were coming, a glimpse of some wounded Germans retiring, the echoing rattle of rifle fire and crash of bombs behind him—that the battalion had been driven back, as half a dozen other battalions had been driven back in the course of the ebb-and-flow fighting through the wood for a couple of weeks past, that hewas lying badly wounded and helpless to defend himself where the Germans could pick him up as a prisoner or finish him off with a saw-backed bayonet as the mood of his discoverers turned. His left leg was broken below the knee, his right shoulder and ribs ached intolerably, a scalp wound six inches long ran across his head from side to side—a wound that, thanks to the steel shrapnel helmet lying dinted in deep across the crown, had not split his head open to the teeth.He felt, as he put it to himself, “done in,” so utterly done in, that for a good hour he was willing to let it go at that, to lie still and wait whatever luck brought him, almost indifferent as to whether it would be another rush that would advance the British line and bring him within reach of his own stretcher-bearers, or his discovery by some of the German soldiers who passed every now and then close to where he lay.Thirst drove him to fumble for his water-bottle, only to find, when he had twisted it round, that a bullet had punctured it, and that it was dry; and, after fifteen torturedminutes, thirst drove him to the impossible, and brought him crawling and dragging his broken leg to a dead body and its full bottle. An eager, choking swallow and a long breath-stopping, gurgling draught gave him more life than he had ever thought to feel again, a sudden revulsion of feeling against the thought of waiting helpless there to be picked up and carted to a German prison camp or butchered where he lay, a quick hope and a desperate resolve to attempt to escape such a fate. He had managed to crawl to the water-bottle; he would attempt to crawl at least a little nearer to the fighting lines, to where he would have more chance of coming under the hands of his own men. Without waste of time he took hasty stock of his wounds and set about preparing for his attempt. The broken leg was the most seriously crippling, but with puttees, bayonets, and trenching-tool handles he so splinted and bound it about that he felt he could crawl and drag it behind him. He attempted to bandage his head, but his arm and shoulder were so stiff and painful when he lifted hishand to his head that he desisted and satisfied himself with a water-soaked pad placed inside a shrapnel helmet. Then he set out to crawl.It is hard to convey to anyone who has not seen such a place the horrible difficulty of the task the Corporal had set himself. The wood had been shelled for weeks, until almost every tree in it had been smashed and knocked down and lay in a wild tangle of trunks, tops, and branches on the ground. The ground itself was pitted with big and little shell-holes, seamed with deep trenches, littered with whole and broken arms and equipments, German and British grenades and bombs, scattered thick with British and German dead who had lain there for any time from hours to weeks. And into and over it all the shells were still crashing and roaring. The air palpitated to their savage rushing, the ground trembled to the impact of their fall, and without pause or break the deep roll of the drumming gun-fire bellowed and thundered. But through all the chaos men were still fighting, and would continue to fight, andthe Corporal had set his mind doggedly to come somewhere near to where they fought. The penetration of such a jungle might have seemed impossible even to a sound and uninjured man; to one in his plight it appeared mere madness to attempt. And yet to attempt it he was determined, and being without any other idea in his throbbing head but the sole one of overcoming each obstacle as he came to it, had no time to consider the impossibility of the complete task.Now, two hundred yards is a short distance as measurement goes, but into those two hundred yards through the chaos of wrecked wood the Corporal packed as much suffering, as dragging a passage of time, as many tortures of hope and fear and pain, as would fill an ordinary lifetime. Every yard was a desperate struggle, every fallen tree-trunk, each tangle of fallen branch, was a cruel problem to be solved, a pain-racked and laborious effort to overcome. A score of times he collapsed and lay panting, and resigned himself to abandoning the struggle; and a score of times he roused himself andfought down numbing pain, and raised himself on trembling arms and knees to crawl again, to wriggle through the wreckage, to hoist himself over some obstacle, to fight his way on for another yard or two.Every conscious thought was busied only and solely with the problems of his passage that presented themselves one by one, but at the back of his mind some self-working reason or instinct held him to his direction, took heed of what went on around him, guided him in action other than that immediately concerned with his passage. When, for instance, he came to a deep trench cutting across his path, he sat long with his whole mind occupied on the question as to whether he should move to right or left, whether the broken place half a dozen yards off the one way or the more completely broken one a dozen yards the other would be the best to make for, scanning this way down and that way up, a litter of barbed wire here and a barrier of broken branches there; and yet, without even lifting his mind from the problem, he was aware of grey coats moving alongthe trench towards him, had sense enough to drop flat and lie huddled and still until the Germans had passed. And that second mind again advised him against crawling down into the trench and making his easier way along it, because it was too probable it would be in use as a passage for Germans, wounded and unwounded.He turned and moved slowly along the edge of the trench at last, and held to it for some distance, because the parapet raised along its edge held up many of the fallen trees and branches enough to let him creep under them. That advantage was discounted to some extent by the number of dead bodies that lay heaped on or under the parapet and told of the struggles and the fierce fighting that had passed for possession of the trench, but on the whole the dead men were less difficult to pass than the clutching, wrenching fingers of the dead wood. The pains in his head, shoulder, and side had by now dulled down to a dead numbness, but his broken leg never ceased to burn and stab with red-hot needles of agony; and for all the splints encasing itand despite all the care he took, there was hardly a yard of his passage that was not marked by some wrenching catch on his foot, some jarring shock or grind and grate of the broken bones.He lost count of time, he lost count of distance, but he kept on crawling. He was utterly indifferent to the turmoil of the guns, to the rush and yell of the near-falling shells, the crash of their bursts, the whirr of the flying splinters. When he had been well and whole these things would have brought his heart to his mouth, would have set him ducking and dodging and shrinking. Now he paid them no fraction of his absorbed attention. But to the distinctive and rising sounds of bursting grenades, to the sharp whip and whistle of rifle bullets about him and through the leaves and twigs, he gave eager attention because they told him he was nearing his goal, was coming at last to somewhere near the fringe of the fighting. His limbs were trembling under him, he was throbbing with pain from head to foot, his head was swimming and his vision was blurred and dim, andat last he was forced to drop and lie still and fight to recover strength to move, and sense to direct his strength. His mind cleared slowly, and he saw at last that he had come to a slightly clearer part of the wood, to a portion nearer its edge where the trees had thinned a little and where the full force of the shell blast had wrecked and re-wrecked and torn fallen trunks and branches to fragments.But although his mind had recovered, his body had not. He found he could barely raise himself on his shaking arms—had not the strength to crawl another yard. He tried and tried again, moved no more than bare inches, and had to drop motionless again.And there he lay and watched a fresh attack launched by the British into the wood, heard and saw the tornado of shell-fire that poured crashing and rending and shattering into the trees, watched the khaki figures swarm forward through the smoke, the spitting flames of the rifles, the spurting fire and smoke of the flung grenades. He still lay on the edge of the broken trench along which hehad crept, and he could just make out that this ran off at an angle away from him and that it was held by the Germans, and formed probably the point of the British attack. He watched the attack with consuming eagerness, hope flaming high as he saw the khaki line press forward, sinking again to leaden depths as it halted or held or swayed back. To him the attack was an affair much more vital than the taking of the trench, the advance by a few score yards of the British line. To him it meant that a successful advance would bring him again within the British lines, its failure leave him still within the German.Into the trench below him a knot of Germans scrambled scuffling, and he lay huddled there almost within arm’s length of them while they hoisted a couple of machine-guns to the edge of the trench and manned the parapet and opened a hail of fire down the length of the struggling British line. Under that streaming fire the line wilted and withered; a fresh torrent of fire smote it, and it crumpled and gave and ebbed back. Butalmost immediately another line swarmed up out of the smoke and swept forward, and this time, although the same flank and frontal fire caught and smote it, the line straggled and swayed forward and plunged into and over the German trench.The Corporal lying there on the trench edge was suddenly aware of a stir amongst the men below him. The edge where he lay half screened in a debris of green stuff and huddled beside a couple of dead Germans was broken down enough to let him see well into the trench, and he understood to the full the meaning of the movements of the Germans in the trench, of their hasty hauling down of the machine-guns, their scrambling retirement crouched and hurrying along the trench back in the direction from which he had come. The trench the British had taken ran out at a right angle from this one where he lay, and the Germans near him were retiring behind the line of trench that had been taken. And that meant he was as good as saved.A minute later two khaki figures emerged from a torn thicket of tree stumps andbranches a dozen yards beyond the trench where he lay, and ran on across towards the denser wood into which the Germans had retreated. One was an officer, and close on their heels came half a dozen, a dozen, a score of men, all following close and pressing on to the wood and opening out as they went. One came to the edge of the trench where the machine-guns had been, and the Corporal with an effort lifted and waved an arm and shouted hoarsely to him. But even as he did so he realised how futile his shout was, how impossible it was for it to carry even the few yards in the pandemonium of noise that raved about them. But he shouted again, and yet again, and felt bitter disappointment as the man without noticing turned and moved along the trench, peering down into it.The Corporal had a sudden sense of someone moving behind him, and twisted round in time to see another khaki figure moving past a dozen paces away and the upper half bodies of half a score more struggling through the thickets beyond. This time he screamed at them, but they too passed, unhearing andunheeding. The Corporal dropped quivering and trying to tell himself that it was all right, that there would be others following, that some of them must come along the trench, that the stretcher-bearers would be following close.But for the moment none followed them, and from where they had vanished came a renewed uproar of grenade-bursts and rifle fire beating out and through the uproar of the guns and the screaming, crashing shells. The Corporal saw a couple of wounded come staggering back ... the tumult of near fighting died down ... a line of German grey-clad shoulders and bobbing “coal-scuttle” helmets plunged through and beyond the thicket from which the khaki had emerged a few minutes before. And then back into the trench below him scuffled the Germans with their two machine-guns. With a groan the Corporal dropped his face in the dirt and dead leaves and groaned hopelessly. He was “done in,” he told himself, “clean done in.” He could see no chance of escape. The line had been driven back, and the last ounce of strength tocrawl.... He tried once before he would finally admit that last ounce gone, but the effort was too much for his exhausted limbs and pain-wrenched body. He dropped to the ground again.The rapid clatter of the two machine-guns close to him lifted his head to watch. The main German trench was spouting dust and debris, flying clouds of leaves, flashing white slivers of bark and wood, under the torrent of shells that poured on it once more. The machine-guns below him ceased, and the Corporal concluded that their target had gone for the moment. But that intense bombardment of the trench almost certainly meant the launching of another British attack, and then the machine-guns would find their target struggling again across their sights and under their streaming fire. They had a good “field of fire,” too, as the Corporal could see. The British line had to advance for the most part through the waist-high tangle of wrecked wood, but by chance or design a clearer patch of ground was swept close to the German trench, and as the advancecrossed this the two machine-guns on the flank near the Corporal would get in their work, would sweep it in enfilade, would be probably the worst obstacle to the advance. And at that a riot of thoughts swept the Corporal’s mind. If he could out those machine-guns ... if he could out those machine-guns ... but how? There were plenty of rifles near, and plenty of dead about with cartridges on them ... but one shot would bring the Germans jumping from their trench on him.... Bombs now ... if he had some Mills’ grenades ... where had he seen....He steadied himself deliberately and thought back. The whole wood was littered with grenades, spilt and scattered broadcast singly and in heaps—German stick-grenades and Mills’. He remembered crawling past a dead bomber with a bag full of Mills’ beside him only a score of yards away. Could he crawl to them and back again? The Germans in the trench might see him; and anyhow—hadn’t he tried? And hadn’t he found the last ounce of his strength gone?But he found another last ounce. He half crawled, half dragged himself back and found his bag of grenades, and with the full bag hooked over his shoulder and a grenade clutched ready in his hand felt himself a new man. His strength was gone, but it takes little strength to pull the pin of a grenade, and if any German rushed him now, at least they’d go together.The machine-guns broke out again, and the Corporal, gasping and straining, struggled foot by foot back towards them. The personal side—the question of his own situation and chances of escape—had left him. He had forgotten himself. His whole mind was centered on the attack, on the effect of those machine-guns’ fire, on the taking of the German trench. He struggled past the break in the trench and on until he had shelter behind the low parapet. He wanted some cover. One grenade wasn’t enough. He wanted to make sure, and he wouldn’t chance a splinter from his own bomb.The machine-guns were chattering and clattering at top speed, and as he pulled thepin of his first grenade the Corporal saw another gun being dragged up beside the others. He held his grenade and counted “one-and-two-and-throw—” and lobbed the grenade over into the trench under the very feet of the machine-gunners. He hastily pulled another pin and threw the grenade ... and as a spurt of smoke and dust leaped from the trench before him and the first grenadescrash-crashed, he went on pulling out the pins and flinging over others as fast as he could pitch. The trench spouted fire and dust and flying dirt and debris, the ground shook beneath him, he was half stunned with the quick-following reports—but the machine-guns had stopped on the first burst.That was all he remembered. This time the last ounce was really gone, and he was practically unconscious when the stretcher-bearers found him after the trench was taken and the attack had passed on deep into the wood.And weeks after, lying snug in bed in a London hospital, after a Sister had scoldedhim for moving in bed and reaching out for a magazine that had dropped to the floor, and told him how urgent it was that he must not move, and how a fractured leg like his must be treated gently and carefully if he did not wish to be a cripple for life, and so on and so forth, he grinned up cheerfully at her. “Or-right, Sister.” he said, “I’ll remember. But it’s a good job for me I didn’t know all that, back there—in the wood.”IVTHE DIVING TANKHis Majesty’sland-ship Hotstuff was busy rebunkering and refilling ammunition in a nicely secluded spot under the lee of a cluster of jagged stumps that had once been trees, while her Skipper walked round her and made a careful examination of her skin. She bore, on her blunt bows especially, the marks of many bullet splashes and stars and scars, and on her starboard gun turret a couple of blackened patches of blistered paint where a persistent Hun had tried his ineffectual best to bomb the good ship at close quarters, without any further result than the burnt paint and a series of bullet holes in the bomber.As the Skipper finished his examination, finding neither crack, dent, nor damage to anything deeper than the paintwork, “All complete” was reported to him, and he and his crew proceeded to dine off bully beef, biscuits,and uncooked prunes. The meal was interrupted by a motor-cyclist, who had to leave his cycle on the roadside and plough on foot through the sticky mud to the Hotstuff’s anchorage, with a written message. The Skipper read the message, initialled the envelope as a receipt, and, meditatively chewing on a dry prune, carefully consulted a squared map criss-crossed and wriggled over by a maze of heavy red lines that marked the German trenches, and pricked off a course to where a closer-packed maze of lines was named as a Redoubt.The Signals dispatch-rider had approached the crew with an enormous curiosity and a deep desire to improve his mind and his knowledge on the subject of “Tanks.” But although the copybook maxims have always encouraged the improvement of one’s mind, the crew of the Hotstuff preferred to remember another copybook dictum, “Silence is golden,” and with the warnings of many months soaked into their very marrows, and with a cautious secrecy that by now had become second, if not first, nature to them, returnedanswers more baffling in their fullness than the deepest silence would have been.“Is it true that them things will turn a point-blank bullet!” asked the dispatch-rider.“Turn them is just the right word, Signals,” said the spokesman. “The armour plating doesn’t stop ’em, you see. They go through, and then by anin-genious arrangement of slanted steel venetian shutters just inside the skin, the bullets are turned, rico up’ard on to another set o’ shutters, deflect again out’ards an’ away. So every bullet that hits us returns to the shooters, with slightly decreased velocity nat’rally, but sufficient penetratin’ power to kill atcon-siderable range.”Signals stared at him suspiciously, but he was so utterly solemn and there was such an entire absence of a twinkling eye or ghostly smile amongst the biscuit-munchers that he was puzzled.“An’ I hear they can go over almost anythin’—trenches, an’ barbed wire, an’ shell-holes, an’ such-like?” he said interrogatively.“Almostanything,” repeated the spokesman,with just a shade of indignation in his tone. “She’s built to go over anything without any almost about it. Why, this mornin’,” he turned to the crew, “what was the name o’ that place wi’ the twelve-foot solid stone wall round it? You know, about eleven miles behind the German lines.”“Eleven miles?” said the Signaller in accents struggling between doubt and incredulity.“About that, accordin’ to the map,” said the other. “That’s about our average cruise.”“But—but,” objected the Signaller, “how wasn’t you cut off—surrounded—er——”“Cut off,” said the Hotstuff cheerfully, “why, of course, we was surrounded,andcut off. But what good was that to ’em? You’ve seen some of us walkin’ up an’ over their front lines, and them shootin’ shells an’ rifles an’ Maxims at us. But they didn’t stop us, did they? So how d’you suppose they stop us comin’ back? But about that wall,” he went on, having reduced the Signaller to pondering silence. “We tried to butt through itan’ couldn’t, so we coupled on the grapplin’-hook bands, an’ walked straight up one side an’ down the other.”“Yes,” put in one of the other Hotstuffs, “an’ doin’ it the boxful o’ tea an’ sugar that was up in the front locker fell away when she upended and tumbled down to the other end. Spilt every blessed grain we had. I don’t hold wi’ that straight-up-and-down manoover myself.”“Oh, well,” said the first man, “I don’t know as it was worse than when we was bein’ towed across the Channel. She makes a rotten bad sea boat, I must confess.”“Towed across?” said the startled Signaller. “You don’t mean to say she floats?”“Why, of course,” said the Hotstuff simply. “Though, mind you, we’re not designed for long voyages under our own power. The whole hull is a watertight tank—wi’ longtitoodinal an’ transverse bulkheads, an’ we’ve an adjustable screw propeller. I dunno as I ought to be talkin’ about that, though,” and he sank his voice and glanced cautiously round at the Skipper folding uphis map. “Don’t breathe a word o’ it to a soul, or I might get into trouble. It’s a little surprise,” he concluded hurriedly, as he saw the Skipper rise, “that we’re savin’ up for the Hun when we gets to the Rhine. He reckons the Rhine is goin’ to hold us up, don’t he? Wait till he sees the Tanks swim it an’ walk up the cliffs on the other side.”The Skipper gave a few quiet orders and the crew vanished, crawling, and one by one, into a little man-hole. The Signaller’s informant found time for a last word to him in passing. “I b’lieve we’re takin’ a turn down across the river an’ canal,” he said. “If you follow us you’ll most likely see us do a practice swim or two.”“Well, I’ve met some dandy liars in my time,” the Signaller murmured to himself, “but that chap’s about IT.”But he stayed to watch the Tank get under way, and after watching her performance and course for a few hundred yards he returned to his motor-bike with struggling doubts in his own mind as to how and in which direction hewas likely to be the bigger fool—in believing or in refusing to believe.The Hotstuff snorted once or twice, shook herself, and rumbled internally; her wheel-bands made a slow revolution or two, churning out a barrowload or so of soft mud, and bit through the loose upper soil into the firmer ground; she jerk-jerked convulsively two or three times, crawled out of the deep wheel-ruts she had dug, turned, nosing a cautious way between the bigger shell craters, and then ploughed off on a straight course towards the road across the sticky mud—mud which the dispatch-rider had utterly failed to negotiate, and which, being impassable to him, he had, out of the knowledge born of long experience, concluded impassable to anything, light or heavy, that ran on wheels. A wide ditch lay between the field and the road, but the Hotstuff steered straight for it and crawled tranquilly across. The dispatch-rider watched the progress across the mud with great interest, whistled softly as he saw the Tank breast the ditch and reach out for the far bank, with her fore-end and nearly halfher length hanging clear out over the water, gasped as the bows dipped and fell downward, her fore-feet clutching at and resting on the further bank, her bows and under-body—the descriptive terms are rather mixed, but then, so is the name and make-up of a Land Ship—hitting the water with a mighty splash. And then, in spite of himself, he broke from wide grins into open laughter as the Hotstuff got a grip of the far bank, pushed with her hind and pulled with her fore legs and dragged herself across. If ever you have seen a fat caterpillar perched on a cabbage leaf’s edge, straining and reaching out with its front feet to reach another leaf, touching it, catching hold, and letting go astern, to pull over the gap, you have a very fair idea of what the Hotstuff looked like crossing that ditch.She wheeled on to the road, and as the dispatch-rider, with mingled awe, amazement, and admiration, watched her lumbering off down it he saw an oil-blackened hand poked out through a gun port and waggled triumphantly back at him. “Damme,” he said, “Ibelieve shecanswim, or stand on her head, or eat peas off a knife. She looks human-intelligent enough for anything.”But the Hotstuff on that particular trip was to display little enough intelligence, but instead an almost human perversity, adding nothing to her battle honours but very much to her skipper’s and crew’s already overcrowded vocabulary of strong language. The engineer showed signs of uneasiness as she trundled down the road, cocking his head to one side and listening with a look of strained attention, stooping his ear to various parts of the engines, squinting along rods, touching his finger-tips to different bearings.“What’s wrong?” asked the Skipper. “Isn’t she behaving herself?”The engineer shook his head. “There’s something not exactly right wi’ her,” he said slowly. “I doubt she’s going to give trouble.”He was right. She gave trouble for one slow mile, more trouble for another half-mile, and then most trouble of all at a spot where the road had degenerated into a seaof thin, porridgy mud. We will say nothing of the technical trouble, but it took four solid hours to get the Hotstuff under way again. The road where she halted was a main thoroughfare to the firing line, and the locality of her break-down, fortunately for the traffic, was where a horse watering trough stood a hundred yards back from the road, and there was ample room to deflect other vehicles past the Hotstuff obstacle, which lay right in the fair-way. All the four hours a procession of motor-cars and lorries, G.S. waggons, and troops of horses streamed by to right and left of the helpless Hotstuff. The cars squirted jets of liquid mud on her as they splashed past, the lorries flung it in great gouts at her, the waggons plastered her lower body liberally, and the horses going to and from water raised objections to her appearance and spattered a quite astonishing amount of mud over her as high as her roof.When finally she got her engines running and pulled out of the quagmire, it was too late to attempt to get her up into the action she had been called to, so her bows wereturned back to her anchorage and she plodded off home. And by the luck of war, and his volunteering out of turn for the trip, the same dispatch-rider brought another message to her early next morning in her berth behind the line.The crew’s night had been spent on internal affairs, and, since there had been no time to attempt to remove any of the accumulation of mud that covered every visible inch of her, she looked like a gigantic wet clay antheap.The dispatch-rider stared at her.“Looks as if she wanted her face washed,” he remarked. “Whathasshe been up to? Thought you said she was going swimming. She don’t look much as if she’d had a bath lately.”His former glib informant slowly straightened a weary back, checked a tart reply, and instead spoke with an excellent simulation of cheeriness.“Didn’t you come an’ watch us yesterday, then?” he said. “Well, you missed a treat—brand-new dodge our Old Man has inventedhisself. When we got ’er in the canal, we closed all ports, elevated our periscope an’ new telescopic air-toob, submerged, and sank to the bottom. And she walked four measured miles under water along the bottom o’ the canal. That”—and he waved his hand towards the mud-hidden Hotstuff—“is where she got all the mud from.”And to this day that dispatch-rider doesn’t know whether he told a gorgeous truth or a still more gorgeous lie.VIN THE MISTWhenthe Lieutenant turned out of his dug-out in the very small hours, he found with satisfaction that a thin mist was hanging over the ground.“Can’t see much,” he said half an hour later, peering out from the front trench. “But so much the better. Means they won’t be so likely to see us. So long, old man. Come along, Studd.”The other officer watched the two crawl out and vanish into the misty darkness. At intervals a flare light leaped upward from one side or the other, but it revealed nothing of the ground, showed only a dim radiance in the mist and vanished. Rifles crackled spasmodically up and down the unseen line, and very occasionally a gun boomed a smothered report and a shellswooshedover. But, on the whole, the night was quiet, or might be calledso by comparison with other nights, and the quietness lent colour to the belief that the Hun was quietly evacuating his badly battered front line. It was to discover what truth was in the report that the Lieutenant had crawled out with one man to get as near as possible to the enemy trench—or, still better, into or over it.Fifty yards out the two ran into one of their own listening posts, and the Lieutenant halted a moment and held a whispered talk with the N.C.O. there. It was all quiet in front, he was told, no sound of movement and only a rifle shot or a light thrown at long intervals.“Might mean anything, or nothing,” thought the Lieutenant. “Either a trench full of Boche taking a chance to sleep, or a trench empty except for a ‘caretaker’ to shoot or chuck up an odd light at intervals.”He whispered as much to his companion and both moved carefully on. The ground was riddled with shell-holes and was soaking wet, and very soon the two were saturated and caked with sticky mud. Skirting the holes and twisting about between them was confusingto any sense of direction, but the two had been well picked for this special work and held fairly straight on their way. No light had shown for a good many minutes, and the Lieutenant fancied that the mist was thickening. He halted and waited a minute, straining his eyes into the mist and his ears to catch any sound. There was nothing apparently to see or hear, and he rose to his knees and moved carefully forward again. As he did so a flare leaped upward with a long hiss and a burst of light glowed out. It faintly illumined the ground and the black shadows of shell-holes about them, and—the Lieutenant with a jump at his heart stilled and stiffened—not six feet away and straight in front, the figure of a man in a long grey coat, his head craned forward and resting on his arms crossed in front of him and twisted in an attitude of listening. Studd, crawling at the Lieutenant’s heels, saw at the same moment, as was told by his hand gripped and pressing a warning on the Lieutenant’s leg. The light died out, and with infinite caution the Lieutenant slid back levelwith Studd and, motioning him to follow, lay flat and hitched himself a foot at a time towards the right to circle round the recumbent German. The man had not been facing full on to them, but lay stretched and looking toward their left, and by a careful circling right the Lieutenant calculated he would clear and creep behind him. A big shell-crater lay in their path, and after a moment’s hesitation the Lieutenant slid very quietly down into it. Some morsels of loose earth crumbled under him, rolled down and fell with tiny splashings into the pool at the bottom. To the Lieutenant the noise was most disconcertingly loud and alarming, and cursing himself for a fool not to have thought of the water and the certainty of his loosening earth to fall into it, he crouched motionless, listening for any sound that would tell of the listening German’s alarm.Another light rose, filling the mist with soft white radiance and outlining the edge of the crater above him. It outlined also the dark shape of a figure halted apparentlyin the very act of crawling down into the crater from the opposite side. The Lieutenant’s first flashing thought was that the German watcher had heard him and was moving to investigate, his second and quick-following was of another German holding still until the light fell. But a third idea came so instantly on the other two that, before the soaring flare dropped, he had time to move sharply, bringing the man’s outline more clearly against the light. That look and the shape, beside but clear of the body, of a bent leg, crooked knee upward, confirmed his last suspicion. Studd slid over soundless as a diving otter and down beside him, and the Lieutenant whispered, “See those two on the edge?”“Both dead, sir,” said Studd, and the Lieutenant nodded and heaved a little sigh of relief. “And I think that first was a dead ‘un too.”“Yes,” whispered the Lieutenant. “Looked natural and listening hard. Remember now, though, he was bareheaded. Dead all right. Come on.”They crept out past the two dead men, and, abating no fraction of their caution, moved noiselessly forward again. They passed many more dead in the next score of yards, dead twisted and contorted to every possible and impossible attitude of unmistakable death and uncannily life-like postures, and came at last to scattered fragments and loose hanging strands of barbed-wire entanglements. Here, according to previous arrangements, Studd—ex-poacher of civilian days and expert scout of the battalion—moved ahead and led the way. Broken strands of wire he lifted with gingerly delicate touch and laid aside. Fixed ones he raised, rolled silently under and held up for the Lieutenant to pass. Taut ones he grasped in one hand, slid the jaws of his wire-nippers over and cut silently between his left-hand fingers, so that the fingers still gripped the severed ends, released the ends carefully, one hand to each, and squirmed through the gap.There was very little uncut wire, but the stealthy movements took time, and half an hour had passed from first wire to last andto the moment when the Lieutenant, in imitation of the figure before him, flattened his body close to the muddy ground and lay still and listening. For five long minutes they lay, and then Studd twisted his head and shoulders back. “Nobody,” he whispered. “Just wait here a minute, sir.” He slipped back past the Lieutenant and almost immediately returned to his side. “I’ve cut the loose wires away,” he said. “Mark this spot and try’n hit it if we have to bolt quick. See—look for this,” and he lifted a bayoneted rifle lying beside them, and stabbed the bayonet down into the ground with the rifle butt standing up above the edge of the broken parapet.“Cross the trench,” whispered the Lieutenant, “and along behind it. Safer there. Any sentry looking out forward?”Studd vanished over the parapet and the Lieutenant squirmed after him. The trench was wide and broken-walled back and front, and both clambered up the other side and began to move along the far edge. In some places the trench narrowed and deepened, inothers it widened and shallowed in tumbled shell-craters, in others again was almost obliterated in heaped and broken earth. The mist had closed down and thickened to a white-grey blanket, and the two moved more freely, standing on their feet and walking stooped and ready to drop at a sound. They went for a considerable distance without seeing a single German.Studd halted suddenly on the edge of a trench which ran into the one they were following.“Communication trench,” said the Lieutenant softly. “Doesn’t seem to be a soul in their front line.”“No, sir,” said Studd, but there was a puzzled note in his voice.“Is this their front line we’ve been moving along?” said the Lieutenant with sudden suspicion. “Those lights look further off than they ought.”The dim lights certainly seemed to be far out on their left and a little behind them. A couple of rifles cracked faintly, and they heard a bullet sigh and whimper overhead.Closer and with sharper reports half a dozen riflesrap-rappedin answer—but the reports were still well out to their left and behind them.“Those are German rifles behind us. We’ve left the front line,” said the Lieutenant with sudden conviction. “Struck slanting back. Been following a communication trench.Damn!”Studd without answering dropped suddenly to earth and without hesitation the Lieutenant dropped beside him and flattened down. A long silence, and the question trembling on his lips was broken by a hasty movement from Studd. “Quick, sir—back,” he said, and hurriedly wriggled back and into a shallow hole, the Lieutenant close after him.There was no need of the question now. Plainly both could hear the squelch of feet, the rustle of clothes, the squeak and click of leather and equipment. Slowly, one by one, a line of men filed past their hiding-place, looming grey and shadowy through the mist, stumbling and slipping so close by that to the Lieutenant it seemed that only one downwardglance from one passing figure was needed to discover them. Tumultuous thoughts raced. What should he do if they were discovered? Pass one quick word to Studd to lie still, and jump and run, trusting to draw pursuit after himself and give Studd a chance to escape and report? Or call Studd to run with him, and both chance a bolt back the way they came? The thick mist might help them, but the alarm would spread quickly to the front trench.... Or should he snatch his revolver—he wished he hadn’t put it back in his holster—blaze off all his rounds, yell and make a row, rousing the German trench to fire and disclose the strength holding it? Could he risk movement enough to get his revolver clear? And all the time he was counting the figures that stumbled past—five ... six ... seven ... eight.... Thirty-four he counted and then, just as he was going to move, another lagging two. After that and a long pause he held hurried consultation with Studd.“They’re moving up the way we came down,” he said. “We’re right off the frontline. Must get back. Daren’t keep too close to this trench though. D’you think we can strike across and find the front line about where we crossed?”“Think so, sir,” answered Studd. “Must work a bit left-handed.”“Come on then. Keep close together,” and they moved off.In three minutes the Lieutenant stopped with a smothered curse at the jar of wire caught against his shins. “’Ware wire,” he said, and both stooped and felt at it. “Nippers,” he said. “We must cut through.” He pulled his own nippers out and they started to cut a path. “Tang!” his nippers swinging free of a cut wire struck against another, and on the sound came a sharp word out of the mist ahead of them and apparently at their very feet a guttural question in unmistakable German. Horrified, the Lieutenant stood stiff frozen for a moment, turned sharp and fumbled a way back, his heart thumping and his nerves tingling in anticipation of another challenge or a sudden shot. But there was no further sound, and presentlyhe and Studd were clear of the wire and hurrying as silently as they could away from the danger.They stopped presently, and the Lieutenant crouched and peered about him. “Now where are we?” he said, and then, as he caught the sound of suppressed chuckling from Studd crouched beside him, “What’s the joke? I don’t see anything specially funny about this job.”“I was thinkin’ of that Germ back there, sir,” said Studd, and giggled again. “About another two steps an’ we’d have fell fair on top of ’im. Bit of a surprise like for ’im, sir.”The Lieutenant grinned a little himself. “Yes,” he said, “but no more surprise than I got when he sang out. Now what d’you think is our direction?”Studd looked round him, and pointed promptly. The Lieutenant disagreed and thought the course lay nearly at right angles to Studd’s selection. He had his compass with him and examined it carefully. “This bit of their front line ran roughly north andsouth,” he said. “If we move west it must fetch us back on it. We must have twisted a bit coming out of that wire—but there’s west,” and he pointed again.“I can’t figure it by compass, sir,” said Studd, “but here’s the way I reckon we came.” He scratched lines on the ground between them with the point of his wire nippers. “Here’s our line, and here’s theirs—running this way.”“Yes, north,” said the Lieutenant.“But then it bends in towards ours—like this—an’ ours bends back.”“Jove, so it does,” admitted the Lieutenant, thinking back to the trench map he had studied so carefully before leaving. “And we moved north behind their trench, so might be round the corner; and a line west would just carry us along behind their front line.”Studd was still busy with his scratchings. “Here’s where we came along and turned off the communication trench. That would bring them lights where we saw them—about here. Then we met them Germs and struck off this way, an’ ran into that wire, an’ thenback—here. So I figure we got to go that way,” and he pointed again.“That’s about it,” agreed the Lieutenant. “But as that’s toward the wire and our friend who sang out, we’ll hold left a bit to try and dodge him.”He stood and looked about him. The mist was wreathing and eddying slowly about them, shutting out everything except a tiny patch of wet ground about their feet. There was a distinct whiteness now about the mist, and a faint glow in the whiteness that told of daylight coming, and the Lieutenant moved hurriedly. “If it comes day and the mist lifts we’re done in,” he said, and moved in the chosen direction. They reached wire again, but watching for it this time avoided striking into it and turned, skirting it towards their left. But the wire bent back and was forcing them left again, or circling back, and the Lieutenant halted in despair. “We’ll have to cut through again and chance it,” he said. “We can’t risk hanging about any longer.”“I’ll just search along a few yards, sir,and see if there’s an opening,” said Studd.“Both go,” said the Lieutenant. “Better keep together.”Within a dozen yards both stopped abruptly and again sank to the ground, the Lieutenant cursing angrily under his breath. Both had caught the sound of voices, and from their lower position could see against the light a line of standing men, apparently right across their path. A spatter of rifle-fire sounded from somewhere out in the mist, and a few bullets whispered high overhead. Then came the distantthud,thud,thudof half a dozen guns firing. One shell wailed distantly over, another passed closer with a savage rush, a third burst twenty yards away with a glaring flash that penetrated even the thick fog. The two had a quick glimpse of a line of Germans in long coats ducking their “coal-scuttle” helmets and throwing themselves to ground. They were not more than thirty feet away, and there were at least a score of them. When their eyes recovered from the flash of the shell, the two could see not more than half a dozenfigures standing, could hear talking and laughing remarks, and presently heard scuffling sounds and saw figure after figure emerge from the ground.“Trench there,” whispered Studd, leaning in to the Lieutenant’s ear. “They jumped down.”“Yes,” breathed the Lieutenant. He was fingering cautiously at the wire beside him. It was staked out, and as far as he could discover there was something like a two-foot clearance between the ground and the bottom strands. It was a chance, and the position was growing so desperate that any chance was worth taking. He touched Studd’s elbow and began to wriggle under the wires. Six feet in they found another line stretched too low to crawl under and could see and feel that the patch of low wire extended some feet. “More coming,” whispered Studd, and the Lieutenant heard again that sound of squelching steps and moving men. They could still see the grey shadowy figures of the first lot standing in the same place, and now out of the mist emergedanother shadowy group moving down the line and past it. There was a good deal of low-toned calling and talking between the two lots, and the Lieutenant, seizing the chance to work under cover of the noise, began rapidly to nip his way through the wire. It was only because of their low position they could see the Germans against the lighter mist, and he was confident, or at least hoped, that from the reversed position it was unlikely they would be seen. The second party passed out of sight, and now the two could see a stir amongst the first lot, saw them hoist and heave bags and parcels to their shoulders and backs, and begin to move slowly in the opposite direction to that taken by the party passing them.“Ration party or ammunition carriers,” said Studd softly.“And moving to the front line,” said the Lieutenant quickly. In an instant he had a plan made. “We must follow them. They’ll guide us to the line. We keep close as we can ... not lose touch and not be seen. Quick, get through there.” He started to niprapidly through the wires. The party had moved and the outline of the last man was blurring and fading into the mist. The Lieutenant rose and began to stride over the low wires. A last barrier rose waist high. With an exclamation of anger he fell to work with the nippers again, Studd assisting him. The men had vanished. The Lieutenant thrust through the wires. His coat caught and he wrenched it free, pushed again and caught again. This time the stout fabric of the trench coat held. There was no second to waste. The Lieutenant flung loose the waist-belt, tore himself out of the sleeves and broke clear, leaving the coat hung in the wires. “Freer for running if we have to bolt at the end,” he said, and hurried after the vanished line, with Studd at his heels. They caught up with it quickly—almost too quickly, because the Lieutenant nearly overran one laggard who had halted and was stooped or kneeling doing something to his bundle on the ground. The Lieutenant just in time saw him rise and swing the bundle to his shoulder and hurry after the others. Behind himcame the two, close enough to keep his dim outline in sight, stooping low and ready to drop flat if need be, moving as silently as possible, checking and waiting crouched down if they found themselves coming too close on their leader. So they kept him in sight until he caught the others up, followed them again so long that a horrible doubt began to fill the Lieutenant’s mind, a fear that they were being led back instead of forward. He would have looked at his compass, but at that moment the dim grey figures before him vanished abruptly one by one.He halted, listening, and Studd at his elbow whispered “Down into a trench, sir.” Both sank to their knees and crawled carefully forward, and in a minute came to the trench and the spot where the man had vanished. “Coming near the front line, I expect,” said the Lieutenant, and on the word came the crack of a rifle from the mist ahead. The Lieutenant heaved a sigh of relief. “Keep down,” he said. “Work along this trench edge. Sure to lead to the front line.”A new hope flooded him. There was stillthe front trench to cross, but the ease with which they had first come over it made him now, turning the prospect over in his mind as he crawled, consider that difficulty with a light heart. His own trench and his friends began to seem very near. Crossing the neutral ground, which at other times would have loomed as a dangerous adventure, was nothing after this hair-raising performance of blundering about inside the German lines. He moved with certainty and confidence, although yet with the greatest caution. Twice they came to a belt of wire running down to the edges of the trench they followed. The Lieutenant, after a brief pause to look and listen, slid down into the trench, passed the wire, climbed out again, always with Studd close behind him. Once they lay flat on the very edge of the trench and watched a German pass along beneath them so close they could have put a hand on his helmet. Once more they crouched in a shell-hole while a dozen men floundered along the trench. And so they came at last to the front line. Foot by foot they wriggled close up to it.The Lieutenant at first saw no sign of a German, but Studd beside him gripped his arm with a warning pressure, and the Lieutenant lay motionless. Suddenly, what he had taken to be part of the outline of the parapet beyond the trench moved and raised, and he saw the outline of a steel-helmeted head and a pair of broad shoulders. The man turned his head and spoke, and with a shock the Lieutenant heard a murmur of voices in the trench, saw figures stir and move in the mist. Studd wriggled noiselessly closer and, with his lips touching the Lieutenant’s ear, whispered “I know where we are. Remember this bit we’re on. We crossed to the left of here.”They backed away from the trench a little and worked carefully along it to their left, and presently Studd whispered, “About here, I think.” They edged closer in, staring across for sight of the silhouette of the rifle butt above the parapet. The mist had grown thicker again and the parapet showed no more than a faint grey bulk against the lighter grey. The trench appeared to be fullof men—“standing to” the Lieutenant supposed they were—and they moved at the most appalling risk, their lives hanging on their silence and stealth, perhaps on the chance of some man climbing back out of the trench. The Lieutenant was shivering with excitement, his nerves jumping at every movement or sound of a voice from the trench beside them.Studd grasped his elbow again and pointed to the broken edge of trench where they lay, and the Lieutenant, thinking he recognised the spot they had climbed out on their first crossing, stared hard across to the parapet in search of the rifle butt. He saw it at last. But what lay between it and them? Were there Germans crouching in the trench bottom? But they must risk that, risk everything in a dash across and over the parapet. A puff of wind stirred and set the mist eddying and lifting a moment. They dare wait no longer. If the wind came the mist would go, and with it would go their chance of crossing the No Man’s Land. He whispered a moment to Studd, sat up, twisted hislegs round to the edge of the trench, slid his trench dagger from its sheath and settled his fingers to a firm grip on the handle, took a deep breath, and slid over feet foremost into the trench. In two quick strides he was across it and scrambling up the parapet. The trench here was badly broken down and a muddy pool lay in the bottom. Studd caught a foot in something and splashed heavily, and a voice from a yard or two on their left called sharply. The Lieutenant slithering over the parapet heard and cringed from the shot he felt must come. But a voice to their right answered; the Lieutenant slid down, saw Studd scramble over after, heard the voices calling and answering and men splashing in the trench behind them. He rose to his feet and ran, Studd following close. From the parapet behind came the spitting bang of a rifle and the bullet whipped past most uncomfortably close. It would have been safer perhaps to have dropped to shelter in a shell-hole and crawled on after a reasonable wait, but the Lieutenant had had enough of crawling and shell-holes forone night, and was in a most single-minded hurry to get away as far and as fast as he could from Germans’ neighbourhood. He and Studd ran on, and no more shots followed them. The mist was thinning rapidly, and they found their own outposts in the act of withdrawal to the trench. The Lieutenant hurried past them, zigzagged through their own wire, and with a gasp of relief jumped down into the trench. He sat there a few minutes to recover his breath and then started along the line to find Headquarters and make his report.On his way he met the officer who had watched them leave the trench and was greeted with a laugh. “Hullo, old cock. Some mud! You look as if you’d been crawling a bit. See any Boche?”“Crawling!” said the Lieutenant. “Any Boche! I’ve been doing nothing but crawl for a hundred years—except when I was squirming on my face. And I’ve been falling over Boche, treading on Boche, bumping into Boche, listening to Boche remarks—oh,ever since I can remember,” and he laughed, just a trifle hysterically.“Did you get over their line then? If so, you’re just back in time. Mist has clean gone in the last few minutes.” A sudden thought struck the Lieutenant. He peered long and carefully over the parapet. The last wisps of mist were shredding away and the jumble of torn ground and trenches and wire in the German lines was plainly visible. “Look,” said the Lieutenant. “Three or four hundred yards behind their line—hanging on some wire. That’s my coat....”

IIIIN THE WOODTheattack on the wood had begun soon after dawn, and it was no more than 8 a.m. when the Corporal was dropped badly wounded in the advance line of the attack where it had penetrated about four hundred yards into the wood. But it was well into afternoon before he sufficiently woke to his surroundings to understand where he was or what had happened, and when he did so he found the realisation sufficiently unpleasant. It was plain from several indications—the direction from which the shells bursting in his vicinity were coming, a glimpse of some wounded Germans retiring, the echoing rattle of rifle fire and crash of bombs behind him—that the battalion had been driven back, as half a dozen other battalions had been driven back in the course of the ebb-and-flow fighting through the wood for a couple of weeks past, that hewas lying badly wounded and helpless to defend himself where the Germans could pick him up as a prisoner or finish him off with a saw-backed bayonet as the mood of his discoverers turned. His left leg was broken below the knee, his right shoulder and ribs ached intolerably, a scalp wound six inches long ran across his head from side to side—a wound that, thanks to the steel shrapnel helmet lying dinted in deep across the crown, had not split his head open to the teeth.He felt, as he put it to himself, “done in,” so utterly done in, that for a good hour he was willing to let it go at that, to lie still and wait whatever luck brought him, almost indifferent as to whether it would be another rush that would advance the British line and bring him within reach of his own stretcher-bearers, or his discovery by some of the German soldiers who passed every now and then close to where he lay.Thirst drove him to fumble for his water-bottle, only to find, when he had twisted it round, that a bullet had punctured it, and that it was dry; and, after fifteen torturedminutes, thirst drove him to the impossible, and brought him crawling and dragging his broken leg to a dead body and its full bottle. An eager, choking swallow and a long breath-stopping, gurgling draught gave him more life than he had ever thought to feel again, a sudden revulsion of feeling against the thought of waiting helpless there to be picked up and carted to a German prison camp or butchered where he lay, a quick hope and a desperate resolve to attempt to escape such a fate. He had managed to crawl to the water-bottle; he would attempt to crawl at least a little nearer to the fighting lines, to where he would have more chance of coming under the hands of his own men. Without waste of time he took hasty stock of his wounds and set about preparing for his attempt. The broken leg was the most seriously crippling, but with puttees, bayonets, and trenching-tool handles he so splinted and bound it about that he felt he could crawl and drag it behind him. He attempted to bandage his head, but his arm and shoulder were so stiff and painful when he lifted hishand to his head that he desisted and satisfied himself with a water-soaked pad placed inside a shrapnel helmet. Then he set out to crawl.It is hard to convey to anyone who has not seen such a place the horrible difficulty of the task the Corporal had set himself. The wood had been shelled for weeks, until almost every tree in it had been smashed and knocked down and lay in a wild tangle of trunks, tops, and branches on the ground. The ground itself was pitted with big and little shell-holes, seamed with deep trenches, littered with whole and broken arms and equipments, German and British grenades and bombs, scattered thick with British and German dead who had lain there for any time from hours to weeks. And into and over it all the shells were still crashing and roaring. The air palpitated to their savage rushing, the ground trembled to the impact of their fall, and without pause or break the deep roll of the drumming gun-fire bellowed and thundered. But through all the chaos men were still fighting, and would continue to fight, andthe Corporal had set his mind doggedly to come somewhere near to where they fought. The penetration of such a jungle might have seemed impossible even to a sound and uninjured man; to one in his plight it appeared mere madness to attempt. And yet to attempt it he was determined, and being without any other idea in his throbbing head but the sole one of overcoming each obstacle as he came to it, had no time to consider the impossibility of the complete task.Now, two hundred yards is a short distance as measurement goes, but into those two hundred yards through the chaos of wrecked wood the Corporal packed as much suffering, as dragging a passage of time, as many tortures of hope and fear and pain, as would fill an ordinary lifetime. Every yard was a desperate struggle, every fallen tree-trunk, each tangle of fallen branch, was a cruel problem to be solved, a pain-racked and laborious effort to overcome. A score of times he collapsed and lay panting, and resigned himself to abandoning the struggle; and a score of times he roused himself andfought down numbing pain, and raised himself on trembling arms and knees to crawl again, to wriggle through the wreckage, to hoist himself over some obstacle, to fight his way on for another yard or two.Every conscious thought was busied only and solely with the problems of his passage that presented themselves one by one, but at the back of his mind some self-working reason or instinct held him to his direction, took heed of what went on around him, guided him in action other than that immediately concerned with his passage. When, for instance, he came to a deep trench cutting across his path, he sat long with his whole mind occupied on the question as to whether he should move to right or left, whether the broken place half a dozen yards off the one way or the more completely broken one a dozen yards the other would be the best to make for, scanning this way down and that way up, a litter of barbed wire here and a barrier of broken branches there; and yet, without even lifting his mind from the problem, he was aware of grey coats moving alongthe trench towards him, had sense enough to drop flat and lie huddled and still until the Germans had passed. And that second mind again advised him against crawling down into the trench and making his easier way along it, because it was too probable it would be in use as a passage for Germans, wounded and unwounded.He turned and moved slowly along the edge of the trench at last, and held to it for some distance, because the parapet raised along its edge held up many of the fallen trees and branches enough to let him creep under them. That advantage was discounted to some extent by the number of dead bodies that lay heaped on or under the parapet and told of the struggles and the fierce fighting that had passed for possession of the trench, but on the whole the dead men were less difficult to pass than the clutching, wrenching fingers of the dead wood. The pains in his head, shoulder, and side had by now dulled down to a dead numbness, but his broken leg never ceased to burn and stab with red-hot needles of agony; and for all the splints encasing itand despite all the care he took, there was hardly a yard of his passage that was not marked by some wrenching catch on his foot, some jarring shock or grind and grate of the broken bones.He lost count of time, he lost count of distance, but he kept on crawling. He was utterly indifferent to the turmoil of the guns, to the rush and yell of the near-falling shells, the crash of their bursts, the whirr of the flying splinters. When he had been well and whole these things would have brought his heart to his mouth, would have set him ducking and dodging and shrinking. Now he paid them no fraction of his absorbed attention. But to the distinctive and rising sounds of bursting grenades, to the sharp whip and whistle of rifle bullets about him and through the leaves and twigs, he gave eager attention because they told him he was nearing his goal, was coming at last to somewhere near the fringe of the fighting. His limbs were trembling under him, he was throbbing with pain from head to foot, his head was swimming and his vision was blurred and dim, andat last he was forced to drop and lie still and fight to recover strength to move, and sense to direct his strength. His mind cleared slowly, and he saw at last that he had come to a slightly clearer part of the wood, to a portion nearer its edge where the trees had thinned a little and where the full force of the shell blast had wrecked and re-wrecked and torn fallen trunks and branches to fragments.But although his mind had recovered, his body had not. He found he could barely raise himself on his shaking arms—had not the strength to crawl another yard. He tried and tried again, moved no more than bare inches, and had to drop motionless again.And there he lay and watched a fresh attack launched by the British into the wood, heard and saw the tornado of shell-fire that poured crashing and rending and shattering into the trees, watched the khaki figures swarm forward through the smoke, the spitting flames of the rifles, the spurting fire and smoke of the flung grenades. He still lay on the edge of the broken trench along which hehad crept, and he could just make out that this ran off at an angle away from him and that it was held by the Germans, and formed probably the point of the British attack. He watched the attack with consuming eagerness, hope flaming high as he saw the khaki line press forward, sinking again to leaden depths as it halted or held or swayed back. To him the attack was an affair much more vital than the taking of the trench, the advance by a few score yards of the British line. To him it meant that a successful advance would bring him again within the British lines, its failure leave him still within the German.Into the trench below him a knot of Germans scrambled scuffling, and he lay huddled there almost within arm’s length of them while they hoisted a couple of machine-guns to the edge of the trench and manned the parapet and opened a hail of fire down the length of the struggling British line. Under that streaming fire the line wilted and withered; a fresh torrent of fire smote it, and it crumpled and gave and ebbed back. Butalmost immediately another line swarmed up out of the smoke and swept forward, and this time, although the same flank and frontal fire caught and smote it, the line straggled and swayed forward and plunged into and over the German trench.The Corporal lying there on the trench edge was suddenly aware of a stir amongst the men below him. The edge where he lay half screened in a debris of green stuff and huddled beside a couple of dead Germans was broken down enough to let him see well into the trench, and he understood to the full the meaning of the movements of the Germans in the trench, of their hasty hauling down of the machine-guns, their scrambling retirement crouched and hurrying along the trench back in the direction from which he had come. The trench the British had taken ran out at a right angle from this one where he lay, and the Germans near him were retiring behind the line of trench that had been taken. And that meant he was as good as saved.A minute later two khaki figures emerged from a torn thicket of tree stumps andbranches a dozen yards beyond the trench where he lay, and ran on across towards the denser wood into which the Germans had retreated. One was an officer, and close on their heels came half a dozen, a dozen, a score of men, all following close and pressing on to the wood and opening out as they went. One came to the edge of the trench where the machine-guns had been, and the Corporal with an effort lifted and waved an arm and shouted hoarsely to him. But even as he did so he realised how futile his shout was, how impossible it was for it to carry even the few yards in the pandemonium of noise that raved about them. But he shouted again, and yet again, and felt bitter disappointment as the man without noticing turned and moved along the trench, peering down into it.The Corporal had a sudden sense of someone moving behind him, and twisted round in time to see another khaki figure moving past a dozen paces away and the upper half bodies of half a score more struggling through the thickets beyond. This time he screamed at them, but they too passed, unhearing andunheeding. The Corporal dropped quivering and trying to tell himself that it was all right, that there would be others following, that some of them must come along the trench, that the stretcher-bearers would be following close.But for the moment none followed them, and from where they had vanished came a renewed uproar of grenade-bursts and rifle fire beating out and through the uproar of the guns and the screaming, crashing shells. The Corporal saw a couple of wounded come staggering back ... the tumult of near fighting died down ... a line of German grey-clad shoulders and bobbing “coal-scuttle” helmets plunged through and beyond the thicket from which the khaki had emerged a few minutes before. And then back into the trench below him scuffled the Germans with their two machine-guns. With a groan the Corporal dropped his face in the dirt and dead leaves and groaned hopelessly. He was “done in,” he told himself, “clean done in.” He could see no chance of escape. The line had been driven back, and the last ounce of strength tocrawl.... He tried once before he would finally admit that last ounce gone, but the effort was too much for his exhausted limbs and pain-wrenched body. He dropped to the ground again.The rapid clatter of the two machine-guns close to him lifted his head to watch. The main German trench was spouting dust and debris, flying clouds of leaves, flashing white slivers of bark and wood, under the torrent of shells that poured on it once more. The machine-guns below him ceased, and the Corporal concluded that their target had gone for the moment. But that intense bombardment of the trench almost certainly meant the launching of another British attack, and then the machine-guns would find their target struggling again across their sights and under their streaming fire. They had a good “field of fire,” too, as the Corporal could see. The British line had to advance for the most part through the waist-high tangle of wrecked wood, but by chance or design a clearer patch of ground was swept close to the German trench, and as the advancecrossed this the two machine-guns on the flank near the Corporal would get in their work, would sweep it in enfilade, would be probably the worst obstacle to the advance. And at that a riot of thoughts swept the Corporal’s mind. If he could out those machine-guns ... if he could out those machine-guns ... but how? There were plenty of rifles near, and plenty of dead about with cartridges on them ... but one shot would bring the Germans jumping from their trench on him.... Bombs now ... if he had some Mills’ grenades ... where had he seen....He steadied himself deliberately and thought back. The whole wood was littered with grenades, spilt and scattered broadcast singly and in heaps—German stick-grenades and Mills’. He remembered crawling past a dead bomber with a bag full of Mills’ beside him only a score of yards away. Could he crawl to them and back again? The Germans in the trench might see him; and anyhow—hadn’t he tried? And hadn’t he found the last ounce of his strength gone?But he found another last ounce. He half crawled, half dragged himself back and found his bag of grenades, and with the full bag hooked over his shoulder and a grenade clutched ready in his hand felt himself a new man. His strength was gone, but it takes little strength to pull the pin of a grenade, and if any German rushed him now, at least they’d go together.The machine-guns broke out again, and the Corporal, gasping and straining, struggled foot by foot back towards them. The personal side—the question of his own situation and chances of escape—had left him. He had forgotten himself. His whole mind was centered on the attack, on the effect of those machine-guns’ fire, on the taking of the German trench. He struggled past the break in the trench and on until he had shelter behind the low parapet. He wanted some cover. One grenade wasn’t enough. He wanted to make sure, and he wouldn’t chance a splinter from his own bomb.The machine-guns were chattering and clattering at top speed, and as he pulled thepin of his first grenade the Corporal saw another gun being dragged up beside the others. He held his grenade and counted “one-and-two-and-throw—” and lobbed the grenade over into the trench under the very feet of the machine-gunners. He hastily pulled another pin and threw the grenade ... and as a spurt of smoke and dust leaped from the trench before him and the first grenadescrash-crashed, he went on pulling out the pins and flinging over others as fast as he could pitch. The trench spouted fire and dust and flying dirt and debris, the ground shook beneath him, he was half stunned with the quick-following reports—but the machine-guns had stopped on the first burst.That was all he remembered. This time the last ounce was really gone, and he was practically unconscious when the stretcher-bearers found him after the trench was taken and the attack had passed on deep into the wood.And weeks after, lying snug in bed in a London hospital, after a Sister had scoldedhim for moving in bed and reaching out for a magazine that had dropped to the floor, and told him how urgent it was that he must not move, and how a fractured leg like his must be treated gently and carefully if he did not wish to be a cripple for life, and so on and so forth, he grinned up cheerfully at her. “Or-right, Sister.” he said, “I’ll remember. But it’s a good job for me I didn’t know all that, back there—in the wood.”

IN THE WOOD

Theattack on the wood had begun soon after dawn, and it was no more than 8 a.m. when the Corporal was dropped badly wounded in the advance line of the attack where it had penetrated about four hundred yards into the wood. But it was well into afternoon before he sufficiently woke to his surroundings to understand where he was or what had happened, and when he did so he found the realisation sufficiently unpleasant. It was plain from several indications—the direction from which the shells bursting in his vicinity were coming, a glimpse of some wounded Germans retiring, the echoing rattle of rifle fire and crash of bombs behind him—that the battalion had been driven back, as half a dozen other battalions had been driven back in the course of the ebb-and-flow fighting through the wood for a couple of weeks past, that hewas lying badly wounded and helpless to defend himself where the Germans could pick him up as a prisoner or finish him off with a saw-backed bayonet as the mood of his discoverers turned. His left leg was broken below the knee, his right shoulder and ribs ached intolerably, a scalp wound six inches long ran across his head from side to side—a wound that, thanks to the steel shrapnel helmet lying dinted in deep across the crown, had not split his head open to the teeth.

He felt, as he put it to himself, “done in,” so utterly done in, that for a good hour he was willing to let it go at that, to lie still and wait whatever luck brought him, almost indifferent as to whether it would be another rush that would advance the British line and bring him within reach of his own stretcher-bearers, or his discovery by some of the German soldiers who passed every now and then close to where he lay.

Thirst drove him to fumble for his water-bottle, only to find, when he had twisted it round, that a bullet had punctured it, and that it was dry; and, after fifteen torturedminutes, thirst drove him to the impossible, and brought him crawling and dragging his broken leg to a dead body and its full bottle. An eager, choking swallow and a long breath-stopping, gurgling draught gave him more life than he had ever thought to feel again, a sudden revulsion of feeling against the thought of waiting helpless there to be picked up and carted to a German prison camp or butchered where he lay, a quick hope and a desperate resolve to attempt to escape such a fate. He had managed to crawl to the water-bottle; he would attempt to crawl at least a little nearer to the fighting lines, to where he would have more chance of coming under the hands of his own men. Without waste of time he took hasty stock of his wounds and set about preparing for his attempt. The broken leg was the most seriously crippling, but with puttees, bayonets, and trenching-tool handles he so splinted and bound it about that he felt he could crawl and drag it behind him. He attempted to bandage his head, but his arm and shoulder were so stiff and painful when he lifted hishand to his head that he desisted and satisfied himself with a water-soaked pad placed inside a shrapnel helmet. Then he set out to crawl.

It is hard to convey to anyone who has not seen such a place the horrible difficulty of the task the Corporal had set himself. The wood had been shelled for weeks, until almost every tree in it had been smashed and knocked down and lay in a wild tangle of trunks, tops, and branches on the ground. The ground itself was pitted with big and little shell-holes, seamed with deep trenches, littered with whole and broken arms and equipments, German and British grenades and bombs, scattered thick with British and German dead who had lain there for any time from hours to weeks. And into and over it all the shells were still crashing and roaring. The air palpitated to their savage rushing, the ground trembled to the impact of their fall, and without pause or break the deep roll of the drumming gun-fire bellowed and thundered. But through all the chaos men were still fighting, and would continue to fight, andthe Corporal had set his mind doggedly to come somewhere near to where they fought. The penetration of such a jungle might have seemed impossible even to a sound and uninjured man; to one in his plight it appeared mere madness to attempt. And yet to attempt it he was determined, and being without any other idea in his throbbing head but the sole one of overcoming each obstacle as he came to it, had no time to consider the impossibility of the complete task.

Now, two hundred yards is a short distance as measurement goes, but into those two hundred yards through the chaos of wrecked wood the Corporal packed as much suffering, as dragging a passage of time, as many tortures of hope and fear and pain, as would fill an ordinary lifetime. Every yard was a desperate struggle, every fallen tree-trunk, each tangle of fallen branch, was a cruel problem to be solved, a pain-racked and laborious effort to overcome. A score of times he collapsed and lay panting, and resigned himself to abandoning the struggle; and a score of times he roused himself andfought down numbing pain, and raised himself on trembling arms and knees to crawl again, to wriggle through the wreckage, to hoist himself over some obstacle, to fight his way on for another yard or two.

Every conscious thought was busied only and solely with the problems of his passage that presented themselves one by one, but at the back of his mind some self-working reason or instinct held him to his direction, took heed of what went on around him, guided him in action other than that immediately concerned with his passage. When, for instance, he came to a deep trench cutting across his path, he sat long with his whole mind occupied on the question as to whether he should move to right or left, whether the broken place half a dozen yards off the one way or the more completely broken one a dozen yards the other would be the best to make for, scanning this way down and that way up, a litter of barbed wire here and a barrier of broken branches there; and yet, without even lifting his mind from the problem, he was aware of grey coats moving alongthe trench towards him, had sense enough to drop flat and lie huddled and still until the Germans had passed. And that second mind again advised him against crawling down into the trench and making his easier way along it, because it was too probable it would be in use as a passage for Germans, wounded and unwounded.

He turned and moved slowly along the edge of the trench at last, and held to it for some distance, because the parapet raised along its edge held up many of the fallen trees and branches enough to let him creep under them. That advantage was discounted to some extent by the number of dead bodies that lay heaped on or under the parapet and told of the struggles and the fierce fighting that had passed for possession of the trench, but on the whole the dead men were less difficult to pass than the clutching, wrenching fingers of the dead wood. The pains in his head, shoulder, and side had by now dulled down to a dead numbness, but his broken leg never ceased to burn and stab with red-hot needles of agony; and for all the splints encasing itand despite all the care he took, there was hardly a yard of his passage that was not marked by some wrenching catch on his foot, some jarring shock or grind and grate of the broken bones.

He lost count of time, he lost count of distance, but he kept on crawling. He was utterly indifferent to the turmoil of the guns, to the rush and yell of the near-falling shells, the crash of their bursts, the whirr of the flying splinters. When he had been well and whole these things would have brought his heart to his mouth, would have set him ducking and dodging and shrinking. Now he paid them no fraction of his absorbed attention. But to the distinctive and rising sounds of bursting grenades, to the sharp whip and whistle of rifle bullets about him and through the leaves and twigs, he gave eager attention because they told him he was nearing his goal, was coming at last to somewhere near the fringe of the fighting. His limbs were trembling under him, he was throbbing with pain from head to foot, his head was swimming and his vision was blurred and dim, andat last he was forced to drop and lie still and fight to recover strength to move, and sense to direct his strength. His mind cleared slowly, and he saw at last that he had come to a slightly clearer part of the wood, to a portion nearer its edge where the trees had thinned a little and where the full force of the shell blast had wrecked and re-wrecked and torn fallen trunks and branches to fragments.

But although his mind had recovered, his body had not. He found he could barely raise himself on his shaking arms—had not the strength to crawl another yard. He tried and tried again, moved no more than bare inches, and had to drop motionless again.

And there he lay and watched a fresh attack launched by the British into the wood, heard and saw the tornado of shell-fire that poured crashing and rending and shattering into the trees, watched the khaki figures swarm forward through the smoke, the spitting flames of the rifles, the spurting fire and smoke of the flung grenades. He still lay on the edge of the broken trench along which hehad crept, and he could just make out that this ran off at an angle away from him and that it was held by the Germans, and formed probably the point of the British attack. He watched the attack with consuming eagerness, hope flaming high as he saw the khaki line press forward, sinking again to leaden depths as it halted or held or swayed back. To him the attack was an affair much more vital than the taking of the trench, the advance by a few score yards of the British line. To him it meant that a successful advance would bring him again within the British lines, its failure leave him still within the German.

Into the trench below him a knot of Germans scrambled scuffling, and he lay huddled there almost within arm’s length of them while they hoisted a couple of machine-guns to the edge of the trench and manned the parapet and opened a hail of fire down the length of the struggling British line. Under that streaming fire the line wilted and withered; a fresh torrent of fire smote it, and it crumpled and gave and ebbed back. Butalmost immediately another line swarmed up out of the smoke and swept forward, and this time, although the same flank and frontal fire caught and smote it, the line straggled and swayed forward and plunged into and over the German trench.

The Corporal lying there on the trench edge was suddenly aware of a stir amongst the men below him. The edge where he lay half screened in a debris of green stuff and huddled beside a couple of dead Germans was broken down enough to let him see well into the trench, and he understood to the full the meaning of the movements of the Germans in the trench, of their hasty hauling down of the machine-guns, their scrambling retirement crouched and hurrying along the trench back in the direction from which he had come. The trench the British had taken ran out at a right angle from this one where he lay, and the Germans near him were retiring behind the line of trench that had been taken. And that meant he was as good as saved.

A minute later two khaki figures emerged from a torn thicket of tree stumps andbranches a dozen yards beyond the trench where he lay, and ran on across towards the denser wood into which the Germans had retreated. One was an officer, and close on their heels came half a dozen, a dozen, a score of men, all following close and pressing on to the wood and opening out as they went. One came to the edge of the trench where the machine-guns had been, and the Corporal with an effort lifted and waved an arm and shouted hoarsely to him. But even as he did so he realised how futile his shout was, how impossible it was for it to carry even the few yards in the pandemonium of noise that raved about them. But he shouted again, and yet again, and felt bitter disappointment as the man without noticing turned and moved along the trench, peering down into it.

The Corporal had a sudden sense of someone moving behind him, and twisted round in time to see another khaki figure moving past a dozen paces away and the upper half bodies of half a score more struggling through the thickets beyond. This time he screamed at them, but they too passed, unhearing andunheeding. The Corporal dropped quivering and trying to tell himself that it was all right, that there would be others following, that some of them must come along the trench, that the stretcher-bearers would be following close.

But for the moment none followed them, and from where they had vanished came a renewed uproar of grenade-bursts and rifle fire beating out and through the uproar of the guns and the screaming, crashing shells. The Corporal saw a couple of wounded come staggering back ... the tumult of near fighting died down ... a line of German grey-clad shoulders and bobbing “coal-scuttle” helmets plunged through and beyond the thicket from which the khaki had emerged a few minutes before. And then back into the trench below him scuffled the Germans with their two machine-guns. With a groan the Corporal dropped his face in the dirt and dead leaves and groaned hopelessly. He was “done in,” he told himself, “clean done in.” He could see no chance of escape. The line had been driven back, and the last ounce of strength tocrawl.... He tried once before he would finally admit that last ounce gone, but the effort was too much for his exhausted limbs and pain-wrenched body. He dropped to the ground again.

The rapid clatter of the two machine-guns close to him lifted his head to watch. The main German trench was spouting dust and debris, flying clouds of leaves, flashing white slivers of bark and wood, under the torrent of shells that poured on it once more. The machine-guns below him ceased, and the Corporal concluded that their target had gone for the moment. But that intense bombardment of the trench almost certainly meant the launching of another British attack, and then the machine-guns would find their target struggling again across their sights and under their streaming fire. They had a good “field of fire,” too, as the Corporal could see. The British line had to advance for the most part through the waist-high tangle of wrecked wood, but by chance or design a clearer patch of ground was swept close to the German trench, and as the advancecrossed this the two machine-guns on the flank near the Corporal would get in their work, would sweep it in enfilade, would be probably the worst obstacle to the advance. And at that a riot of thoughts swept the Corporal’s mind. If he could out those machine-guns ... if he could out those machine-guns ... but how? There were plenty of rifles near, and plenty of dead about with cartridges on them ... but one shot would bring the Germans jumping from their trench on him.... Bombs now ... if he had some Mills’ grenades ... where had he seen....

He steadied himself deliberately and thought back. The whole wood was littered with grenades, spilt and scattered broadcast singly and in heaps—German stick-grenades and Mills’. He remembered crawling past a dead bomber with a bag full of Mills’ beside him only a score of yards away. Could he crawl to them and back again? The Germans in the trench might see him; and anyhow—hadn’t he tried? And hadn’t he found the last ounce of his strength gone?

But he found another last ounce. He half crawled, half dragged himself back and found his bag of grenades, and with the full bag hooked over his shoulder and a grenade clutched ready in his hand felt himself a new man. His strength was gone, but it takes little strength to pull the pin of a grenade, and if any German rushed him now, at least they’d go together.

The machine-guns broke out again, and the Corporal, gasping and straining, struggled foot by foot back towards them. The personal side—the question of his own situation and chances of escape—had left him. He had forgotten himself. His whole mind was centered on the attack, on the effect of those machine-guns’ fire, on the taking of the German trench. He struggled past the break in the trench and on until he had shelter behind the low parapet. He wanted some cover. One grenade wasn’t enough. He wanted to make sure, and he wouldn’t chance a splinter from his own bomb.

The machine-guns were chattering and clattering at top speed, and as he pulled thepin of his first grenade the Corporal saw another gun being dragged up beside the others. He held his grenade and counted “one-and-two-and-throw—” and lobbed the grenade over into the trench under the very feet of the machine-gunners. He hastily pulled another pin and threw the grenade ... and as a spurt of smoke and dust leaped from the trench before him and the first grenadescrash-crashed, he went on pulling out the pins and flinging over others as fast as he could pitch. The trench spouted fire and dust and flying dirt and debris, the ground shook beneath him, he was half stunned with the quick-following reports—but the machine-guns had stopped on the first burst.

That was all he remembered. This time the last ounce was really gone, and he was practically unconscious when the stretcher-bearers found him after the trench was taken and the attack had passed on deep into the wood.

And weeks after, lying snug in bed in a London hospital, after a Sister had scoldedhim for moving in bed and reaching out for a magazine that had dropped to the floor, and told him how urgent it was that he must not move, and how a fractured leg like his must be treated gently and carefully if he did not wish to be a cripple for life, and so on and so forth, he grinned up cheerfully at her. “Or-right, Sister.” he said, “I’ll remember. But it’s a good job for me I didn’t know all that, back there—in the wood.”

IVTHE DIVING TANKHis Majesty’sland-ship Hotstuff was busy rebunkering and refilling ammunition in a nicely secluded spot under the lee of a cluster of jagged stumps that had once been trees, while her Skipper walked round her and made a careful examination of her skin. She bore, on her blunt bows especially, the marks of many bullet splashes and stars and scars, and on her starboard gun turret a couple of blackened patches of blistered paint where a persistent Hun had tried his ineffectual best to bomb the good ship at close quarters, without any further result than the burnt paint and a series of bullet holes in the bomber.As the Skipper finished his examination, finding neither crack, dent, nor damage to anything deeper than the paintwork, “All complete” was reported to him, and he and his crew proceeded to dine off bully beef, biscuits,and uncooked prunes. The meal was interrupted by a motor-cyclist, who had to leave his cycle on the roadside and plough on foot through the sticky mud to the Hotstuff’s anchorage, with a written message. The Skipper read the message, initialled the envelope as a receipt, and, meditatively chewing on a dry prune, carefully consulted a squared map criss-crossed and wriggled over by a maze of heavy red lines that marked the German trenches, and pricked off a course to where a closer-packed maze of lines was named as a Redoubt.The Signals dispatch-rider had approached the crew with an enormous curiosity and a deep desire to improve his mind and his knowledge on the subject of “Tanks.” But although the copybook maxims have always encouraged the improvement of one’s mind, the crew of the Hotstuff preferred to remember another copybook dictum, “Silence is golden,” and with the warnings of many months soaked into their very marrows, and with a cautious secrecy that by now had become second, if not first, nature to them, returnedanswers more baffling in their fullness than the deepest silence would have been.“Is it true that them things will turn a point-blank bullet!” asked the dispatch-rider.“Turn them is just the right word, Signals,” said the spokesman. “The armour plating doesn’t stop ’em, you see. They go through, and then by anin-genious arrangement of slanted steel venetian shutters just inside the skin, the bullets are turned, rico up’ard on to another set o’ shutters, deflect again out’ards an’ away. So every bullet that hits us returns to the shooters, with slightly decreased velocity nat’rally, but sufficient penetratin’ power to kill atcon-siderable range.”Signals stared at him suspiciously, but he was so utterly solemn and there was such an entire absence of a twinkling eye or ghostly smile amongst the biscuit-munchers that he was puzzled.“An’ I hear they can go over almost anythin’—trenches, an’ barbed wire, an’ shell-holes, an’ such-like?” he said interrogatively.“Almostanything,” repeated the spokesman,with just a shade of indignation in his tone. “She’s built to go over anything without any almost about it. Why, this mornin’,” he turned to the crew, “what was the name o’ that place wi’ the twelve-foot solid stone wall round it? You know, about eleven miles behind the German lines.”“Eleven miles?” said the Signaller in accents struggling between doubt and incredulity.“About that, accordin’ to the map,” said the other. “That’s about our average cruise.”“But—but,” objected the Signaller, “how wasn’t you cut off—surrounded—er——”“Cut off,” said the Hotstuff cheerfully, “why, of course, we was surrounded,andcut off. But what good was that to ’em? You’ve seen some of us walkin’ up an’ over their front lines, and them shootin’ shells an’ rifles an’ Maxims at us. But they didn’t stop us, did they? So how d’you suppose they stop us comin’ back? But about that wall,” he went on, having reduced the Signaller to pondering silence. “We tried to butt through itan’ couldn’t, so we coupled on the grapplin’-hook bands, an’ walked straight up one side an’ down the other.”“Yes,” put in one of the other Hotstuffs, “an’ doin’ it the boxful o’ tea an’ sugar that was up in the front locker fell away when she upended and tumbled down to the other end. Spilt every blessed grain we had. I don’t hold wi’ that straight-up-and-down manoover myself.”“Oh, well,” said the first man, “I don’t know as it was worse than when we was bein’ towed across the Channel. She makes a rotten bad sea boat, I must confess.”“Towed across?” said the startled Signaller. “You don’t mean to say she floats?”“Why, of course,” said the Hotstuff simply. “Though, mind you, we’re not designed for long voyages under our own power. The whole hull is a watertight tank—wi’ longtitoodinal an’ transverse bulkheads, an’ we’ve an adjustable screw propeller. I dunno as I ought to be talkin’ about that, though,” and he sank his voice and glanced cautiously round at the Skipper folding uphis map. “Don’t breathe a word o’ it to a soul, or I might get into trouble. It’s a little surprise,” he concluded hurriedly, as he saw the Skipper rise, “that we’re savin’ up for the Hun when we gets to the Rhine. He reckons the Rhine is goin’ to hold us up, don’t he? Wait till he sees the Tanks swim it an’ walk up the cliffs on the other side.”The Skipper gave a few quiet orders and the crew vanished, crawling, and one by one, into a little man-hole. The Signaller’s informant found time for a last word to him in passing. “I b’lieve we’re takin’ a turn down across the river an’ canal,” he said. “If you follow us you’ll most likely see us do a practice swim or two.”“Well, I’ve met some dandy liars in my time,” the Signaller murmured to himself, “but that chap’s about IT.”But he stayed to watch the Tank get under way, and after watching her performance and course for a few hundred yards he returned to his motor-bike with struggling doubts in his own mind as to how and in which direction hewas likely to be the bigger fool—in believing or in refusing to believe.The Hotstuff snorted once or twice, shook herself, and rumbled internally; her wheel-bands made a slow revolution or two, churning out a barrowload or so of soft mud, and bit through the loose upper soil into the firmer ground; she jerk-jerked convulsively two or three times, crawled out of the deep wheel-ruts she had dug, turned, nosing a cautious way between the bigger shell craters, and then ploughed off on a straight course towards the road across the sticky mud—mud which the dispatch-rider had utterly failed to negotiate, and which, being impassable to him, he had, out of the knowledge born of long experience, concluded impassable to anything, light or heavy, that ran on wheels. A wide ditch lay between the field and the road, but the Hotstuff steered straight for it and crawled tranquilly across. The dispatch-rider watched the progress across the mud with great interest, whistled softly as he saw the Tank breast the ditch and reach out for the far bank, with her fore-end and nearly halfher length hanging clear out over the water, gasped as the bows dipped and fell downward, her fore-feet clutching at and resting on the further bank, her bows and under-body—the descriptive terms are rather mixed, but then, so is the name and make-up of a Land Ship—hitting the water with a mighty splash. And then, in spite of himself, he broke from wide grins into open laughter as the Hotstuff got a grip of the far bank, pushed with her hind and pulled with her fore legs and dragged herself across. If ever you have seen a fat caterpillar perched on a cabbage leaf’s edge, straining and reaching out with its front feet to reach another leaf, touching it, catching hold, and letting go astern, to pull over the gap, you have a very fair idea of what the Hotstuff looked like crossing that ditch.She wheeled on to the road, and as the dispatch-rider, with mingled awe, amazement, and admiration, watched her lumbering off down it he saw an oil-blackened hand poked out through a gun port and waggled triumphantly back at him. “Damme,” he said, “Ibelieve shecanswim, or stand on her head, or eat peas off a knife. She looks human-intelligent enough for anything.”But the Hotstuff on that particular trip was to display little enough intelligence, but instead an almost human perversity, adding nothing to her battle honours but very much to her skipper’s and crew’s already overcrowded vocabulary of strong language. The engineer showed signs of uneasiness as she trundled down the road, cocking his head to one side and listening with a look of strained attention, stooping his ear to various parts of the engines, squinting along rods, touching his finger-tips to different bearings.“What’s wrong?” asked the Skipper. “Isn’t she behaving herself?”The engineer shook his head. “There’s something not exactly right wi’ her,” he said slowly. “I doubt she’s going to give trouble.”He was right. She gave trouble for one slow mile, more trouble for another half-mile, and then most trouble of all at a spot where the road had degenerated into a seaof thin, porridgy mud. We will say nothing of the technical trouble, but it took four solid hours to get the Hotstuff under way again. The road where she halted was a main thoroughfare to the firing line, and the locality of her break-down, fortunately for the traffic, was where a horse watering trough stood a hundred yards back from the road, and there was ample room to deflect other vehicles past the Hotstuff obstacle, which lay right in the fair-way. All the four hours a procession of motor-cars and lorries, G.S. waggons, and troops of horses streamed by to right and left of the helpless Hotstuff. The cars squirted jets of liquid mud on her as they splashed past, the lorries flung it in great gouts at her, the waggons plastered her lower body liberally, and the horses going to and from water raised objections to her appearance and spattered a quite astonishing amount of mud over her as high as her roof.When finally she got her engines running and pulled out of the quagmire, it was too late to attempt to get her up into the action she had been called to, so her bows wereturned back to her anchorage and she plodded off home. And by the luck of war, and his volunteering out of turn for the trip, the same dispatch-rider brought another message to her early next morning in her berth behind the line.The crew’s night had been spent on internal affairs, and, since there had been no time to attempt to remove any of the accumulation of mud that covered every visible inch of her, she looked like a gigantic wet clay antheap.The dispatch-rider stared at her.“Looks as if she wanted her face washed,” he remarked. “Whathasshe been up to? Thought you said she was going swimming. She don’t look much as if she’d had a bath lately.”His former glib informant slowly straightened a weary back, checked a tart reply, and instead spoke with an excellent simulation of cheeriness.“Didn’t you come an’ watch us yesterday, then?” he said. “Well, you missed a treat—brand-new dodge our Old Man has inventedhisself. When we got ’er in the canal, we closed all ports, elevated our periscope an’ new telescopic air-toob, submerged, and sank to the bottom. And she walked four measured miles under water along the bottom o’ the canal. That”—and he waved his hand towards the mud-hidden Hotstuff—“is where she got all the mud from.”And to this day that dispatch-rider doesn’t know whether he told a gorgeous truth or a still more gorgeous lie.

THE DIVING TANK

His Majesty’sland-ship Hotstuff was busy rebunkering and refilling ammunition in a nicely secluded spot under the lee of a cluster of jagged stumps that had once been trees, while her Skipper walked round her and made a careful examination of her skin. She bore, on her blunt bows especially, the marks of many bullet splashes and stars and scars, and on her starboard gun turret a couple of blackened patches of blistered paint where a persistent Hun had tried his ineffectual best to bomb the good ship at close quarters, without any further result than the burnt paint and a series of bullet holes in the bomber.

As the Skipper finished his examination, finding neither crack, dent, nor damage to anything deeper than the paintwork, “All complete” was reported to him, and he and his crew proceeded to dine off bully beef, biscuits,and uncooked prunes. The meal was interrupted by a motor-cyclist, who had to leave his cycle on the roadside and plough on foot through the sticky mud to the Hotstuff’s anchorage, with a written message. The Skipper read the message, initialled the envelope as a receipt, and, meditatively chewing on a dry prune, carefully consulted a squared map criss-crossed and wriggled over by a maze of heavy red lines that marked the German trenches, and pricked off a course to where a closer-packed maze of lines was named as a Redoubt.

The Signals dispatch-rider had approached the crew with an enormous curiosity and a deep desire to improve his mind and his knowledge on the subject of “Tanks.” But although the copybook maxims have always encouraged the improvement of one’s mind, the crew of the Hotstuff preferred to remember another copybook dictum, “Silence is golden,” and with the warnings of many months soaked into their very marrows, and with a cautious secrecy that by now had become second, if not first, nature to them, returnedanswers more baffling in their fullness than the deepest silence would have been.

“Is it true that them things will turn a point-blank bullet!” asked the dispatch-rider.

“Turn them is just the right word, Signals,” said the spokesman. “The armour plating doesn’t stop ’em, you see. They go through, and then by anin-genious arrangement of slanted steel venetian shutters just inside the skin, the bullets are turned, rico up’ard on to another set o’ shutters, deflect again out’ards an’ away. So every bullet that hits us returns to the shooters, with slightly decreased velocity nat’rally, but sufficient penetratin’ power to kill atcon-siderable range.”

Signals stared at him suspiciously, but he was so utterly solemn and there was such an entire absence of a twinkling eye or ghostly smile amongst the biscuit-munchers that he was puzzled.

“An’ I hear they can go over almost anythin’—trenches, an’ barbed wire, an’ shell-holes, an’ such-like?” he said interrogatively.

“Almostanything,” repeated the spokesman,with just a shade of indignation in his tone. “She’s built to go over anything without any almost about it. Why, this mornin’,” he turned to the crew, “what was the name o’ that place wi’ the twelve-foot solid stone wall round it? You know, about eleven miles behind the German lines.”

“Eleven miles?” said the Signaller in accents struggling between doubt and incredulity.

“About that, accordin’ to the map,” said the other. “That’s about our average cruise.”

“But—but,” objected the Signaller, “how wasn’t you cut off—surrounded—er——”

“Cut off,” said the Hotstuff cheerfully, “why, of course, we was surrounded,andcut off. But what good was that to ’em? You’ve seen some of us walkin’ up an’ over their front lines, and them shootin’ shells an’ rifles an’ Maxims at us. But they didn’t stop us, did they? So how d’you suppose they stop us comin’ back? But about that wall,” he went on, having reduced the Signaller to pondering silence. “We tried to butt through itan’ couldn’t, so we coupled on the grapplin’-hook bands, an’ walked straight up one side an’ down the other.”

“Yes,” put in one of the other Hotstuffs, “an’ doin’ it the boxful o’ tea an’ sugar that was up in the front locker fell away when she upended and tumbled down to the other end. Spilt every blessed grain we had. I don’t hold wi’ that straight-up-and-down manoover myself.”

“Oh, well,” said the first man, “I don’t know as it was worse than when we was bein’ towed across the Channel. She makes a rotten bad sea boat, I must confess.”

“Towed across?” said the startled Signaller. “You don’t mean to say she floats?”

“Why, of course,” said the Hotstuff simply. “Though, mind you, we’re not designed for long voyages under our own power. The whole hull is a watertight tank—wi’ longtitoodinal an’ transverse bulkheads, an’ we’ve an adjustable screw propeller. I dunno as I ought to be talkin’ about that, though,” and he sank his voice and glanced cautiously round at the Skipper folding uphis map. “Don’t breathe a word o’ it to a soul, or I might get into trouble. It’s a little surprise,” he concluded hurriedly, as he saw the Skipper rise, “that we’re savin’ up for the Hun when we gets to the Rhine. He reckons the Rhine is goin’ to hold us up, don’t he? Wait till he sees the Tanks swim it an’ walk up the cliffs on the other side.”

The Skipper gave a few quiet orders and the crew vanished, crawling, and one by one, into a little man-hole. The Signaller’s informant found time for a last word to him in passing. “I b’lieve we’re takin’ a turn down across the river an’ canal,” he said. “If you follow us you’ll most likely see us do a practice swim or two.”

“Well, I’ve met some dandy liars in my time,” the Signaller murmured to himself, “but that chap’s about IT.”

But he stayed to watch the Tank get under way, and after watching her performance and course for a few hundred yards he returned to his motor-bike with struggling doubts in his own mind as to how and in which direction hewas likely to be the bigger fool—in believing or in refusing to believe.

The Hotstuff snorted once or twice, shook herself, and rumbled internally; her wheel-bands made a slow revolution or two, churning out a barrowload or so of soft mud, and bit through the loose upper soil into the firmer ground; she jerk-jerked convulsively two or three times, crawled out of the deep wheel-ruts she had dug, turned, nosing a cautious way between the bigger shell craters, and then ploughed off on a straight course towards the road across the sticky mud—mud which the dispatch-rider had utterly failed to negotiate, and which, being impassable to him, he had, out of the knowledge born of long experience, concluded impassable to anything, light or heavy, that ran on wheels. A wide ditch lay between the field and the road, but the Hotstuff steered straight for it and crawled tranquilly across. The dispatch-rider watched the progress across the mud with great interest, whistled softly as he saw the Tank breast the ditch and reach out for the far bank, with her fore-end and nearly halfher length hanging clear out over the water, gasped as the bows dipped and fell downward, her fore-feet clutching at and resting on the further bank, her bows and under-body—the descriptive terms are rather mixed, but then, so is the name and make-up of a Land Ship—hitting the water with a mighty splash. And then, in spite of himself, he broke from wide grins into open laughter as the Hotstuff got a grip of the far bank, pushed with her hind and pulled with her fore legs and dragged herself across. If ever you have seen a fat caterpillar perched on a cabbage leaf’s edge, straining and reaching out with its front feet to reach another leaf, touching it, catching hold, and letting go astern, to pull over the gap, you have a very fair idea of what the Hotstuff looked like crossing that ditch.

She wheeled on to the road, and as the dispatch-rider, with mingled awe, amazement, and admiration, watched her lumbering off down it he saw an oil-blackened hand poked out through a gun port and waggled triumphantly back at him. “Damme,” he said, “Ibelieve shecanswim, or stand on her head, or eat peas off a knife. She looks human-intelligent enough for anything.”

But the Hotstuff on that particular trip was to display little enough intelligence, but instead an almost human perversity, adding nothing to her battle honours but very much to her skipper’s and crew’s already overcrowded vocabulary of strong language. The engineer showed signs of uneasiness as she trundled down the road, cocking his head to one side and listening with a look of strained attention, stooping his ear to various parts of the engines, squinting along rods, touching his finger-tips to different bearings.

“What’s wrong?” asked the Skipper. “Isn’t she behaving herself?”

The engineer shook his head. “There’s something not exactly right wi’ her,” he said slowly. “I doubt she’s going to give trouble.”

He was right. She gave trouble for one slow mile, more trouble for another half-mile, and then most trouble of all at a spot where the road had degenerated into a seaof thin, porridgy mud. We will say nothing of the technical trouble, but it took four solid hours to get the Hotstuff under way again. The road where she halted was a main thoroughfare to the firing line, and the locality of her break-down, fortunately for the traffic, was where a horse watering trough stood a hundred yards back from the road, and there was ample room to deflect other vehicles past the Hotstuff obstacle, which lay right in the fair-way. All the four hours a procession of motor-cars and lorries, G.S. waggons, and troops of horses streamed by to right and left of the helpless Hotstuff. The cars squirted jets of liquid mud on her as they splashed past, the lorries flung it in great gouts at her, the waggons plastered her lower body liberally, and the horses going to and from water raised objections to her appearance and spattered a quite astonishing amount of mud over her as high as her roof.

When finally she got her engines running and pulled out of the quagmire, it was too late to attempt to get her up into the action she had been called to, so her bows wereturned back to her anchorage and she plodded off home. And by the luck of war, and his volunteering out of turn for the trip, the same dispatch-rider brought another message to her early next morning in her berth behind the line.

The crew’s night had been spent on internal affairs, and, since there had been no time to attempt to remove any of the accumulation of mud that covered every visible inch of her, she looked like a gigantic wet clay antheap.

The dispatch-rider stared at her.

“Looks as if she wanted her face washed,” he remarked. “Whathasshe been up to? Thought you said she was going swimming. She don’t look much as if she’d had a bath lately.”

His former glib informant slowly straightened a weary back, checked a tart reply, and instead spoke with an excellent simulation of cheeriness.

“Didn’t you come an’ watch us yesterday, then?” he said. “Well, you missed a treat—brand-new dodge our Old Man has inventedhisself. When we got ’er in the canal, we closed all ports, elevated our periscope an’ new telescopic air-toob, submerged, and sank to the bottom. And she walked four measured miles under water along the bottom o’ the canal. That”—and he waved his hand towards the mud-hidden Hotstuff—“is where she got all the mud from.”

And to this day that dispatch-rider doesn’t know whether he told a gorgeous truth or a still more gorgeous lie.

VIN THE MISTWhenthe Lieutenant turned out of his dug-out in the very small hours, he found with satisfaction that a thin mist was hanging over the ground.“Can’t see much,” he said half an hour later, peering out from the front trench. “But so much the better. Means they won’t be so likely to see us. So long, old man. Come along, Studd.”The other officer watched the two crawl out and vanish into the misty darkness. At intervals a flare light leaped upward from one side or the other, but it revealed nothing of the ground, showed only a dim radiance in the mist and vanished. Rifles crackled spasmodically up and down the unseen line, and very occasionally a gun boomed a smothered report and a shellswooshedover. But, on the whole, the night was quiet, or might be calledso by comparison with other nights, and the quietness lent colour to the belief that the Hun was quietly evacuating his badly battered front line. It was to discover what truth was in the report that the Lieutenant had crawled out with one man to get as near as possible to the enemy trench—or, still better, into or over it.Fifty yards out the two ran into one of their own listening posts, and the Lieutenant halted a moment and held a whispered talk with the N.C.O. there. It was all quiet in front, he was told, no sound of movement and only a rifle shot or a light thrown at long intervals.“Might mean anything, or nothing,” thought the Lieutenant. “Either a trench full of Boche taking a chance to sleep, or a trench empty except for a ‘caretaker’ to shoot or chuck up an odd light at intervals.”He whispered as much to his companion and both moved carefully on. The ground was riddled with shell-holes and was soaking wet, and very soon the two were saturated and caked with sticky mud. Skirting the holes and twisting about between them was confusingto any sense of direction, but the two had been well picked for this special work and held fairly straight on their way. No light had shown for a good many minutes, and the Lieutenant fancied that the mist was thickening. He halted and waited a minute, straining his eyes into the mist and his ears to catch any sound. There was nothing apparently to see or hear, and he rose to his knees and moved carefully forward again. As he did so a flare leaped upward with a long hiss and a burst of light glowed out. It faintly illumined the ground and the black shadows of shell-holes about them, and—the Lieutenant with a jump at his heart stilled and stiffened—not six feet away and straight in front, the figure of a man in a long grey coat, his head craned forward and resting on his arms crossed in front of him and twisted in an attitude of listening. Studd, crawling at the Lieutenant’s heels, saw at the same moment, as was told by his hand gripped and pressing a warning on the Lieutenant’s leg. The light died out, and with infinite caution the Lieutenant slid back levelwith Studd and, motioning him to follow, lay flat and hitched himself a foot at a time towards the right to circle round the recumbent German. The man had not been facing full on to them, but lay stretched and looking toward their left, and by a careful circling right the Lieutenant calculated he would clear and creep behind him. A big shell-crater lay in their path, and after a moment’s hesitation the Lieutenant slid very quietly down into it. Some morsels of loose earth crumbled under him, rolled down and fell with tiny splashings into the pool at the bottom. To the Lieutenant the noise was most disconcertingly loud and alarming, and cursing himself for a fool not to have thought of the water and the certainty of his loosening earth to fall into it, he crouched motionless, listening for any sound that would tell of the listening German’s alarm.Another light rose, filling the mist with soft white radiance and outlining the edge of the crater above him. It outlined also the dark shape of a figure halted apparentlyin the very act of crawling down into the crater from the opposite side. The Lieutenant’s first flashing thought was that the German watcher had heard him and was moving to investigate, his second and quick-following was of another German holding still until the light fell. But a third idea came so instantly on the other two that, before the soaring flare dropped, he had time to move sharply, bringing the man’s outline more clearly against the light. That look and the shape, beside but clear of the body, of a bent leg, crooked knee upward, confirmed his last suspicion. Studd slid over soundless as a diving otter and down beside him, and the Lieutenant whispered, “See those two on the edge?”“Both dead, sir,” said Studd, and the Lieutenant nodded and heaved a little sigh of relief. “And I think that first was a dead ‘un too.”“Yes,” whispered the Lieutenant. “Looked natural and listening hard. Remember now, though, he was bareheaded. Dead all right. Come on.”They crept out past the two dead men, and, abating no fraction of their caution, moved noiselessly forward again. They passed many more dead in the next score of yards, dead twisted and contorted to every possible and impossible attitude of unmistakable death and uncannily life-like postures, and came at last to scattered fragments and loose hanging strands of barbed-wire entanglements. Here, according to previous arrangements, Studd—ex-poacher of civilian days and expert scout of the battalion—moved ahead and led the way. Broken strands of wire he lifted with gingerly delicate touch and laid aside. Fixed ones he raised, rolled silently under and held up for the Lieutenant to pass. Taut ones he grasped in one hand, slid the jaws of his wire-nippers over and cut silently between his left-hand fingers, so that the fingers still gripped the severed ends, released the ends carefully, one hand to each, and squirmed through the gap.There was very little uncut wire, but the stealthy movements took time, and half an hour had passed from first wire to last andto the moment when the Lieutenant, in imitation of the figure before him, flattened his body close to the muddy ground and lay still and listening. For five long minutes they lay, and then Studd twisted his head and shoulders back. “Nobody,” he whispered. “Just wait here a minute, sir.” He slipped back past the Lieutenant and almost immediately returned to his side. “I’ve cut the loose wires away,” he said. “Mark this spot and try’n hit it if we have to bolt quick. See—look for this,” and he lifted a bayoneted rifle lying beside them, and stabbed the bayonet down into the ground with the rifle butt standing up above the edge of the broken parapet.“Cross the trench,” whispered the Lieutenant, “and along behind it. Safer there. Any sentry looking out forward?”Studd vanished over the parapet and the Lieutenant squirmed after him. The trench was wide and broken-walled back and front, and both clambered up the other side and began to move along the far edge. In some places the trench narrowed and deepened, inothers it widened and shallowed in tumbled shell-craters, in others again was almost obliterated in heaped and broken earth. The mist had closed down and thickened to a white-grey blanket, and the two moved more freely, standing on their feet and walking stooped and ready to drop at a sound. They went for a considerable distance without seeing a single German.Studd halted suddenly on the edge of a trench which ran into the one they were following.“Communication trench,” said the Lieutenant softly. “Doesn’t seem to be a soul in their front line.”“No, sir,” said Studd, but there was a puzzled note in his voice.“Is this their front line we’ve been moving along?” said the Lieutenant with sudden suspicion. “Those lights look further off than they ought.”The dim lights certainly seemed to be far out on their left and a little behind them. A couple of rifles cracked faintly, and they heard a bullet sigh and whimper overhead.Closer and with sharper reports half a dozen riflesrap-rappedin answer—but the reports were still well out to their left and behind them.“Those are German rifles behind us. We’ve left the front line,” said the Lieutenant with sudden conviction. “Struck slanting back. Been following a communication trench.Damn!”Studd without answering dropped suddenly to earth and without hesitation the Lieutenant dropped beside him and flattened down. A long silence, and the question trembling on his lips was broken by a hasty movement from Studd. “Quick, sir—back,” he said, and hurriedly wriggled back and into a shallow hole, the Lieutenant close after him.There was no need of the question now. Plainly both could hear the squelch of feet, the rustle of clothes, the squeak and click of leather and equipment. Slowly, one by one, a line of men filed past their hiding-place, looming grey and shadowy through the mist, stumbling and slipping so close by that to the Lieutenant it seemed that only one downwardglance from one passing figure was needed to discover them. Tumultuous thoughts raced. What should he do if they were discovered? Pass one quick word to Studd to lie still, and jump and run, trusting to draw pursuit after himself and give Studd a chance to escape and report? Or call Studd to run with him, and both chance a bolt back the way they came? The thick mist might help them, but the alarm would spread quickly to the front trench.... Or should he snatch his revolver—he wished he hadn’t put it back in his holster—blaze off all his rounds, yell and make a row, rousing the German trench to fire and disclose the strength holding it? Could he risk movement enough to get his revolver clear? And all the time he was counting the figures that stumbled past—five ... six ... seven ... eight.... Thirty-four he counted and then, just as he was going to move, another lagging two. After that and a long pause he held hurried consultation with Studd.“They’re moving up the way we came down,” he said. “We’re right off the frontline. Must get back. Daren’t keep too close to this trench though. D’you think we can strike across and find the front line about where we crossed?”“Think so, sir,” answered Studd. “Must work a bit left-handed.”“Come on then. Keep close together,” and they moved off.In three minutes the Lieutenant stopped with a smothered curse at the jar of wire caught against his shins. “’Ware wire,” he said, and both stooped and felt at it. “Nippers,” he said. “We must cut through.” He pulled his own nippers out and they started to cut a path. “Tang!” his nippers swinging free of a cut wire struck against another, and on the sound came a sharp word out of the mist ahead of them and apparently at their very feet a guttural question in unmistakable German. Horrified, the Lieutenant stood stiff frozen for a moment, turned sharp and fumbled a way back, his heart thumping and his nerves tingling in anticipation of another challenge or a sudden shot. But there was no further sound, and presentlyhe and Studd were clear of the wire and hurrying as silently as they could away from the danger.They stopped presently, and the Lieutenant crouched and peered about him. “Now where are we?” he said, and then, as he caught the sound of suppressed chuckling from Studd crouched beside him, “What’s the joke? I don’t see anything specially funny about this job.”“I was thinkin’ of that Germ back there, sir,” said Studd, and giggled again. “About another two steps an’ we’d have fell fair on top of ’im. Bit of a surprise like for ’im, sir.”The Lieutenant grinned a little himself. “Yes,” he said, “but no more surprise than I got when he sang out. Now what d’you think is our direction?”Studd looked round him, and pointed promptly. The Lieutenant disagreed and thought the course lay nearly at right angles to Studd’s selection. He had his compass with him and examined it carefully. “This bit of their front line ran roughly north andsouth,” he said. “If we move west it must fetch us back on it. We must have twisted a bit coming out of that wire—but there’s west,” and he pointed again.“I can’t figure it by compass, sir,” said Studd, “but here’s the way I reckon we came.” He scratched lines on the ground between them with the point of his wire nippers. “Here’s our line, and here’s theirs—running this way.”“Yes, north,” said the Lieutenant.“But then it bends in towards ours—like this—an’ ours bends back.”“Jove, so it does,” admitted the Lieutenant, thinking back to the trench map he had studied so carefully before leaving. “And we moved north behind their trench, so might be round the corner; and a line west would just carry us along behind their front line.”Studd was still busy with his scratchings. “Here’s where we came along and turned off the communication trench. That would bring them lights where we saw them—about here. Then we met them Germs and struck off this way, an’ ran into that wire, an’ thenback—here. So I figure we got to go that way,” and he pointed again.“That’s about it,” agreed the Lieutenant. “But as that’s toward the wire and our friend who sang out, we’ll hold left a bit to try and dodge him.”He stood and looked about him. The mist was wreathing and eddying slowly about them, shutting out everything except a tiny patch of wet ground about their feet. There was a distinct whiteness now about the mist, and a faint glow in the whiteness that told of daylight coming, and the Lieutenant moved hurriedly. “If it comes day and the mist lifts we’re done in,” he said, and moved in the chosen direction. They reached wire again, but watching for it this time avoided striking into it and turned, skirting it towards their left. But the wire bent back and was forcing them left again, or circling back, and the Lieutenant halted in despair. “We’ll have to cut through again and chance it,” he said. “We can’t risk hanging about any longer.”“I’ll just search along a few yards, sir,and see if there’s an opening,” said Studd.“Both go,” said the Lieutenant. “Better keep together.”Within a dozen yards both stopped abruptly and again sank to the ground, the Lieutenant cursing angrily under his breath. Both had caught the sound of voices, and from their lower position could see against the light a line of standing men, apparently right across their path. A spatter of rifle-fire sounded from somewhere out in the mist, and a few bullets whispered high overhead. Then came the distantthud,thud,thudof half a dozen guns firing. One shell wailed distantly over, another passed closer with a savage rush, a third burst twenty yards away with a glaring flash that penetrated even the thick fog. The two had a quick glimpse of a line of Germans in long coats ducking their “coal-scuttle” helmets and throwing themselves to ground. They were not more than thirty feet away, and there were at least a score of them. When their eyes recovered from the flash of the shell, the two could see not more than half a dozenfigures standing, could hear talking and laughing remarks, and presently heard scuffling sounds and saw figure after figure emerge from the ground.“Trench there,” whispered Studd, leaning in to the Lieutenant’s ear. “They jumped down.”“Yes,” breathed the Lieutenant. He was fingering cautiously at the wire beside him. It was staked out, and as far as he could discover there was something like a two-foot clearance between the ground and the bottom strands. It was a chance, and the position was growing so desperate that any chance was worth taking. He touched Studd’s elbow and began to wriggle under the wires. Six feet in they found another line stretched too low to crawl under and could see and feel that the patch of low wire extended some feet. “More coming,” whispered Studd, and the Lieutenant heard again that sound of squelching steps and moving men. They could still see the grey shadowy figures of the first lot standing in the same place, and now out of the mist emergedanother shadowy group moving down the line and past it. There was a good deal of low-toned calling and talking between the two lots, and the Lieutenant, seizing the chance to work under cover of the noise, began rapidly to nip his way through the wire. It was only because of their low position they could see the Germans against the lighter mist, and he was confident, or at least hoped, that from the reversed position it was unlikely they would be seen. The second party passed out of sight, and now the two could see a stir amongst the first lot, saw them hoist and heave bags and parcels to their shoulders and backs, and begin to move slowly in the opposite direction to that taken by the party passing them.“Ration party or ammunition carriers,” said Studd softly.“And moving to the front line,” said the Lieutenant quickly. In an instant he had a plan made. “We must follow them. They’ll guide us to the line. We keep close as we can ... not lose touch and not be seen. Quick, get through there.” He started to niprapidly through the wires. The party had moved and the outline of the last man was blurring and fading into the mist. The Lieutenant rose and began to stride over the low wires. A last barrier rose waist high. With an exclamation of anger he fell to work with the nippers again, Studd assisting him. The men had vanished. The Lieutenant thrust through the wires. His coat caught and he wrenched it free, pushed again and caught again. This time the stout fabric of the trench coat held. There was no second to waste. The Lieutenant flung loose the waist-belt, tore himself out of the sleeves and broke clear, leaving the coat hung in the wires. “Freer for running if we have to bolt at the end,” he said, and hurried after the vanished line, with Studd at his heels. They caught up with it quickly—almost too quickly, because the Lieutenant nearly overran one laggard who had halted and was stooped or kneeling doing something to his bundle on the ground. The Lieutenant just in time saw him rise and swing the bundle to his shoulder and hurry after the others. Behind himcame the two, close enough to keep his dim outline in sight, stooping low and ready to drop flat if need be, moving as silently as possible, checking and waiting crouched down if they found themselves coming too close on their leader. So they kept him in sight until he caught the others up, followed them again so long that a horrible doubt began to fill the Lieutenant’s mind, a fear that they were being led back instead of forward. He would have looked at his compass, but at that moment the dim grey figures before him vanished abruptly one by one.He halted, listening, and Studd at his elbow whispered “Down into a trench, sir.” Both sank to their knees and crawled carefully forward, and in a minute came to the trench and the spot where the man had vanished. “Coming near the front line, I expect,” said the Lieutenant, and on the word came the crack of a rifle from the mist ahead. The Lieutenant heaved a sigh of relief. “Keep down,” he said. “Work along this trench edge. Sure to lead to the front line.”A new hope flooded him. There was stillthe front trench to cross, but the ease with which they had first come over it made him now, turning the prospect over in his mind as he crawled, consider that difficulty with a light heart. His own trench and his friends began to seem very near. Crossing the neutral ground, which at other times would have loomed as a dangerous adventure, was nothing after this hair-raising performance of blundering about inside the German lines. He moved with certainty and confidence, although yet with the greatest caution. Twice they came to a belt of wire running down to the edges of the trench they followed. The Lieutenant, after a brief pause to look and listen, slid down into the trench, passed the wire, climbed out again, always with Studd close behind him. Once they lay flat on the very edge of the trench and watched a German pass along beneath them so close they could have put a hand on his helmet. Once more they crouched in a shell-hole while a dozen men floundered along the trench. And so they came at last to the front line. Foot by foot they wriggled close up to it.The Lieutenant at first saw no sign of a German, but Studd beside him gripped his arm with a warning pressure, and the Lieutenant lay motionless. Suddenly, what he had taken to be part of the outline of the parapet beyond the trench moved and raised, and he saw the outline of a steel-helmeted head and a pair of broad shoulders. The man turned his head and spoke, and with a shock the Lieutenant heard a murmur of voices in the trench, saw figures stir and move in the mist. Studd wriggled noiselessly closer and, with his lips touching the Lieutenant’s ear, whispered “I know where we are. Remember this bit we’re on. We crossed to the left of here.”They backed away from the trench a little and worked carefully along it to their left, and presently Studd whispered, “About here, I think.” They edged closer in, staring across for sight of the silhouette of the rifle butt above the parapet. The mist had grown thicker again and the parapet showed no more than a faint grey bulk against the lighter grey. The trench appeared to be fullof men—“standing to” the Lieutenant supposed they were—and they moved at the most appalling risk, their lives hanging on their silence and stealth, perhaps on the chance of some man climbing back out of the trench. The Lieutenant was shivering with excitement, his nerves jumping at every movement or sound of a voice from the trench beside them.Studd grasped his elbow again and pointed to the broken edge of trench where they lay, and the Lieutenant, thinking he recognised the spot they had climbed out on their first crossing, stared hard across to the parapet in search of the rifle butt. He saw it at last. But what lay between it and them? Were there Germans crouching in the trench bottom? But they must risk that, risk everything in a dash across and over the parapet. A puff of wind stirred and set the mist eddying and lifting a moment. They dare wait no longer. If the wind came the mist would go, and with it would go their chance of crossing the No Man’s Land. He whispered a moment to Studd, sat up, twisted hislegs round to the edge of the trench, slid his trench dagger from its sheath and settled his fingers to a firm grip on the handle, took a deep breath, and slid over feet foremost into the trench. In two quick strides he was across it and scrambling up the parapet. The trench here was badly broken down and a muddy pool lay in the bottom. Studd caught a foot in something and splashed heavily, and a voice from a yard or two on their left called sharply. The Lieutenant slithering over the parapet heard and cringed from the shot he felt must come. But a voice to their right answered; the Lieutenant slid down, saw Studd scramble over after, heard the voices calling and answering and men splashing in the trench behind them. He rose to his feet and ran, Studd following close. From the parapet behind came the spitting bang of a rifle and the bullet whipped past most uncomfortably close. It would have been safer perhaps to have dropped to shelter in a shell-hole and crawled on after a reasonable wait, but the Lieutenant had had enough of crawling and shell-holes forone night, and was in a most single-minded hurry to get away as far and as fast as he could from Germans’ neighbourhood. He and Studd ran on, and no more shots followed them. The mist was thinning rapidly, and they found their own outposts in the act of withdrawal to the trench. The Lieutenant hurried past them, zigzagged through their own wire, and with a gasp of relief jumped down into the trench. He sat there a few minutes to recover his breath and then started along the line to find Headquarters and make his report.On his way he met the officer who had watched them leave the trench and was greeted with a laugh. “Hullo, old cock. Some mud! You look as if you’d been crawling a bit. See any Boche?”“Crawling!” said the Lieutenant. “Any Boche! I’ve been doing nothing but crawl for a hundred years—except when I was squirming on my face. And I’ve been falling over Boche, treading on Boche, bumping into Boche, listening to Boche remarks—oh,ever since I can remember,” and he laughed, just a trifle hysterically.“Did you get over their line then? If so, you’re just back in time. Mist has clean gone in the last few minutes.” A sudden thought struck the Lieutenant. He peered long and carefully over the parapet. The last wisps of mist were shredding away and the jumble of torn ground and trenches and wire in the German lines was plainly visible. “Look,” said the Lieutenant. “Three or four hundred yards behind their line—hanging on some wire. That’s my coat....”

IN THE MIST

Whenthe Lieutenant turned out of his dug-out in the very small hours, he found with satisfaction that a thin mist was hanging over the ground.

“Can’t see much,” he said half an hour later, peering out from the front trench. “But so much the better. Means they won’t be so likely to see us. So long, old man. Come along, Studd.”

The other officer watched the two crawl out and vanish into the misty darkness. At intervals a flare light leaped upward from one side or the other, but it revealed nothing of the ground, showed only a dim radiance in the mist and vanished. Rifles crackled spasmodically up and down the unseen line, and very occasionally a gun boomed a smothered report and a shellswooshedover. But, on the whole, the night was quiet, or might be calledso by comparison with other nights, and the quietness lent colour to the belief that the Hun was quietly evacuating his badly battered front line. It was to discover what truth was in the report that the Lieutenant had crawled out with one man to get as near as possible to the enemy trench—or, still better, into or over it.

Fifty yards out the two ran into one of their own listening posts, and the Lieutenant halted a moment and held a whispered talk with the N.C.O. there. It was all quiet in front, he was told, no sound of movement and only a rifle shot or a light thrown at long intervals.

“Might mean anything, or nothing,” thought the Lieutenant. “Either a trench full of Boche taking a chance to sleep, or a trench empty except for a ‘caretaker’ to shoot or chuck up an odd light at intervals.”

He whispered as much to his companion and both moved carefully on. The ground was riddled with shell-holes and was soaking wet, and very soon the two were saturated and caked with sticky mud. Skirting the holes and twisting about between them was confusingto any sense of direction, but the two had been well picked for this special work and held fairly straight on their way. No light had shown for a good many minutes, and the Lieutenant fancied that the mist was thickening. He halted and waited a minute, straining his eyes into the mist and his ears to catch any sound. There was nothing apparently to see or hear, and he rose to his knees and moved carefully forward again. As he did so a flare leaped upward with a long hiss and a burst of light glowed out. It faintly illumined the ground and the black shadows of shell-holes about them, and—the Lieutenant with a jump at his heart stilled and stiffened—not six feet away and straight in front, the figure of a man in a long grey coat, his head craned forward and resting on his arms crossed in front of him and twisted in an attitude of listening. Studd, crawling at the Lieutenant’s heels, saw at the same moment, as was told by his hand gripped and pressing a warning on the Lieutenant’s leg. The light died out, and with infinite caution the Lieutenant slid back levelwith Studd and, motioning him to follow, lay flat and hitched himself a foot at a time towards the right to circle round the recumbent German. The man had not been facing full on to them, but lay stretched and looking toward their left, and by a careful circling right the Lieutenant calculated he would clear and creep behind him. A big shell-crater lay in their path, and after a moment’s hesitation the Lieutenant slid very quietly down into it. Some morsels of loose earth crumbled under him, rolled down and fell with tiny splashings into the pool at the bottom. To the Lieutenant the noise was most disconcertingly loud and alarming, and cursing himself for a fool not to have thought of the water and the certainty of his loosening earth to fall into it, he crouched motionless, listening for any sound that would tell of the listening German’s alarm.

Another light rose, filling the mist with soft white radiance and outlining the edge of the crater above him. It outlined also the dark shape of a figure halted apparentlyin the very act of crawling down into the crater from the opposite side. The Lieutenant’s first flashing thought was that the German watcher had heard him and was moving to investigate, his second and quick-following was of another German holding still until the light fell. But a third idea came so instantly on the other two that, before the soaring flare dropped, he had time to move sharply, bringing the man’s outline more clearly against the light. That look and the shape, beside but clear of the body, of a bent leg, crooked knee upward, confirmed his last suspicion. Studd slid over soundless as a diving otter and down beside him, and the Lieutenant whispered, “See those two on the edge?”

“Both dead, sir,” said Studd, and the Lieutenant nodded and heaved a little sigh of relief. “And I think that first was a dead ‘un too.”

“Yes,” whispered the Lieutenant. “Looked natural and listening hard. Remember now, though, he was bareheaded. Dead all right. Come on.”

They crept out past the two dead men, and, abating no fraction of their caution, moved noiselessly forward again. They passed many more dead in the next score of yards, dead twisted and contorted to every possible and impossible attitude of unmistakable death and uncannily life-like postures, and came at last to scattered fragments and loose hanging strands of barbed-wire entanglements. Here, according to previous arrangements, Studd—ex-poacher of civilian days and expert scout of the battalion—moved ahead and led the way. Broken strands of wire he lifted with gingerly delicate touch and laid aside. Fixed ones he raised, rolled silently under and held up for the Lieutenant to pass. Taut ones he grasped in one hand, slid the jaws of his wire-nippers over and cut silently between his left-hand fingers, so that the fingers still gripped the severed ends, released the ends carefully, one hand to each, and squirmed through the gap.

There was very little uncut wire, but the stealthy movements took time, and half an hour had passed from first wire to last andto the moment when the Lieutenant, in imitation of the figure before him, flattened his body close to the muddy ground and lay still and listening. For five long minutes they lay, and then Studd twisted his head and shoulders back. “Nobody,” he whispered. “Just wait here a minute, sir.” He slipped back past the Lieutenant and almost immediately returned to his side. “I’ve cut the loose wires away,” he said. “Mark this spot and try’n hit it if we have to bolt quick. See—look for this,” and he lifted a bayoneted rifle lying beside them, and stabbed the bayonet down into the ground with the rifle butt standing up above the edge of the broken parapet.

“Cross the trench,” whispered the Lieutenant, “and along behind it. Safer there. Any sentry looking out forward?”

Studd vanished over the parapet and the Lieutenant squirmed after him. The trench was wide and broken-walled back and front, and both clambered up the other side and began to move along the far edge. In some places the trench narrowed and deepened, inothers it widened and shallowed in tumbled shell-craters, in others again was almost obliterated in heaped and broken earth. The mist had closed down and thickened to a white-grey blanket, and the two moved more freely, standing on their feet and walking stooped and ready to drop at a sound. They went for a considerable distance without seeing a single German.

Studd halted suddenly on the edge of a trench which ran into the one they were following.

“Communication trench,” said the Lieutenant softly. “Doesn’t seem to be a soul in their front line.”

“No, sir,” said Studd, but there was a puzzled note in his voice.

“Is this their front line we’ve been moving along?” said the Lieutenant with sudden suspicion. “Those lights look further off than they ought.”

The dim lights certainly seemed to be far out on their left and a little behind them. A couple of rifles cracked faintly, and they heard a bullet sigh and whimper overhead.Closer and with sharper reports half a dozen riflesrap-rappedin answer—but the reports were still well out to their left and behind them.

“Those are German rifles behind us. We’ve left the front line,” said the Lieutenant with sudden conviction. “Struck slanting back. Been following a communication trench.Damn!”

Studd without answering dropped suddenly to earth and without hesitation the Lieutenant dropped beside him and flattened down. A long silence, and the question trembling on his lips was broken by a hasty movement from Studd. “Quick, sir—back,” he said, and hurriedly wriggled back and into a shallow hole, the Lieutenant close after him.

There was no need of the question now. Plainly both could hear the squelch of feet, the rustle of clothes, the squeak and click of leather and equipment. Slowly, one by one, a line of men filed past their hiding-place, looming grey and shadowy through the mist, stumbling and slipping so close by that to the Lieutenant it seemed that only one downwardglance from one passing figure was needed to discover them. Tumultuous thoughts raced. What should he do if they were discovered? Pass one quick word to Studd to lie still, and jump and run, trusting to draw pursuit after himself and give Studd a chance to escape and report? Or call Studd to run with him, and both chance a bolt back the way they came? The thick mist might help them, but the alarm would spread quickly to the front trench.... Or should he snatch his revolver—he wished he hadn’t put it back in his holster—blaze off all his rounds, yell and make a row, rousing the German trench to fire and disclose the strength holding it? Could he risk movement enough to get his revolver clear? And all the time he was counting the figures that stumbled past—five ... six ... seven ... eight.... Thirty-four he counted and then, just as he was going to move, another lagging two. After that and a long pause he held hurried consultation with Studd.

“They’re moving up the way we came down,” he said. “We’re right off the frontline. Must get back. Daren’t keep too close to this trench though. D’you think we can strike across and find the front line about where we crossed?”

“Think so, sir,” answered Studd. “Must work a bit left-handed.”

“Come on then. Keep close together,” and they moved off.

In three minutes the Lieutenant stopped with a smothered curse at the jar of wire caught against his shins. “’Ware wire,” he said, and both stooped and felt at it. “Nippers,” he said. “We must cut through.” He pulled his own nippers out and they started to cut a path. “Tang!” his nippers swinging free of a cut wire struck against another, and on the sound came a sharp word out of the mist ahead of them and apparently at their very feet a guttural question in unmistakable German. Horrified, the Lieutenant stood stiff frozen for a moment, turned sharp and fumbled a way back, his heart thumping and his nerves tingling in anticipation of another challenge or a sudden shot. But there was no further sound, and presentlyhe and Studd were clear of the wire and hurrying as silently as they could away from the danger.

They stopped presently, and the Lieutenant crouched and peered about him. “Now where are we?” he said, and then, as he caught the sound of suppressed chuckling from Studd crouched beside him, “What’s the joke? I don’t see anything specially funny about this job.”

“I was thinkin’ of that Germ back there, sir,” said Studd, and giggled again. “About another two steps an’ we’d have fell fair on top of ’im. Bit of a surprise like for ’im, sir.”

The Lieutenant grinned a little himself. “Yes,” he said, “but no more surprise than I got when he sang out. Now what d’you think is our direction?”

Studd looked round him, and pointed promptly. The Lieutenant disagreed and thought the course lay nearly at right angles to Studd’s selection. He had his compass with him and examined it carefully. “This bit of their front line ran roughly north andsouth,” he said. “If we move west it must fetch us back on it. We must have twisted a bit coming out of that wire—but there’s west,” and he pointed again.

“I can’t figure it by compass, sir,” said Studd, “but here’s the way I reckon we came.” He scratched lines on the ground between them with the point of his wire nippers. “Here’s our line, and here’s theirs—running this way.”

“Yes, north,” said the Lieutenant.

“But then it bends in towards ours—like this—an’ ours bends back.”

“Jove, so it does,” admitted the Lieutenant, thinking back to the trench map he had studied so carefully before leaving. “And we moved north behind their trench, so might be round the corner; and a line west would just carry us along behind their front line.”

Studd was still busy with his scratchings. “Here’s where we came along and turned off the communication trench. That would bring them lights where we saw them—about here. Then we met them Germs and struck off this way, an’ ran into that wire, an’ thenback—here. So I figure we got to go that way,” and he pointed again.

“That’s about it,” agreed the Lieutenant. “But as that’s toward the wire and our friend who sang out, we’ll hold left a bit to try and dodge him.”

He stood and looked about him. The mist was wreathing and eddying slowly about them, shutting out everything except a tiny patch of wet ground about their feet. There was a distinct whiteness now about the mist, and a faint glow in the whiteness that told of daylight coming, and the Lieutenant moved hurriedly. “If it comes day and the mist lifts we’re done in,” he said, and moved in the chosen direction. They reached wire again, but watching for it this time avoided striking into it and turned, skirting it towards their left. But the wire bent back and was forcing them left again, or circling back, and the Lieutenant halted in despair. “We’ll have to cut through again and chance it,” he said. “We can’t risk hanging about any longer.”

“I’ll just search along a few yards, sir,and see if there’s an opening,” said Studd.

“Both go,” said the Lieutenant. “Better keep together.”

Within a dozen yards both stopped abruptly and again sank to the ground, the Lieutenant cursing angrily under his breath. Both had caught the sound of voices, and from their lower position could see against the light a line of standing men, apparently right across their path. A spatter of rifle-fire sounded from somewhere out in the mist, and a few bullets whispered high overhead. Then came the distantthud,thud,thudof half a dozen guns firing. One shell wailed distantly over, another passed closer with a savage rush, a third burst twenty yards away with a glaring flash that penetrated even the thick fog. The two had a quick glimpse of a line of Germans in long coats ducking their “coal-scuttle” helmets and throwing themselves to ground. They were not more than thirty feet away, and there were at least a score of them. When their eyes recovered from the flash of the shell, the two could see not more than half a dozenfigures standing, could hear talking and laughing remarks, and presently heard scuffling sounds and saw figure after figure emerge from the ground.

“Trench there,” whispered Studd, leaning in to the Lieutenant’s ear. “They jumped down.”

“Yes,” breathed the Lieutenant. He was fingering cautiously at the wire beside him. It was staked out, and as far as he could discover there was something like a two-foot clearance between the ground and the bottom strands. It was a chance, and the position was growing so desperate that any chance was worth taking. He touched Studd’s elbow and began to wriggle under the wires. Six feet in they found another line stretched too low to crawl under and could see and feel that the patch of low wire extended some feet. “More coming,” whispered Studd, and the Lieutenant heard again that sound of squelching steps and moving men. They could still see the grey shadowy figures of the first lot standing in the same place, and now out of the mist emergedanother shadowy group moving down the line and past it. There was a good deal of low-toned calling and talking between the two lots, and the Lieutenant, seizing the chance to work under cover of the noise, began rapidly to nip his way through the wire. It was only because of their low position they could see the Germans against the lighter mist, and he was confident, or at least hoped, that from the reversed position it was unlikely they would be seen. The second party passed out of sight, and now the two could see a stir amongst the first lot, saw them hoist and heave bags and parcels to their shoulders and backs, and begin to move slowly in the opposite direction to that taken by the party passing them.

“Ration party or ammunition carriers,” said Studd softly.

“And moving to the front line,” said the Lieutenant quickly. In an instant he had a plan made. “We must follow them. They’ll guide us to the line. We keep close as we can ... not lose touch and not be seen. Quick, get through there.” He started to niprapidly through the wires. The party had moved and the outline of the last man was blurring and fading into the mist. The Lieutenant rose and began to stride over the low wires. A last barrier rose waist high. With an exclamation of anger he fell to work with the nippers again, Studd assisting him. The men had vanished. The Lieutenant thrust through the wires. His coat caught and he wrenched it free, pushed again and caught again. This time the stout fabric of the trench coat held. There was no second to waste. The Lieutenant flung loose the waist-belt, tore himself out of the sleeves and broke clear, leaving the coat hung in the wires. “Freer for running if we have to bolt at the end,” he said, and hurried after the vanished line, with Studd at his heels. They caught up with it quickly—almost too quickly, because the Lieutenant nearly overran one laggard who had halted and was stooped or kneeling doing something to his bundle on the ground. The Lieutenant just in time saw him rise and swing the bundle to his shoulder and hurry after the others. Behind himcame the two, close enough to keep his dim outline in sight, stooping low and ready to drop flat if need be, moving as silently as possible, checking and waiting crouched down if they found themselves coming too close on their leader. So they kept him in sight until he caught the others up, followed them again so long that a horrible doubt began to fill the Lieutenant’s mind, a fear that they were being led back instead of forward. He would have looked at his compass, but at that moment the dim grey figures before him vanished abruptly one by one.

He halted, listening, and Studd at his elbow whispered “Down into a trench, sir.” Both sank to their knees and crawled carefully forward, and in a minute came to the trench and the spot where the man had vanished. “Coming near the front line, I expect,” said the Lieutenant, and on the word came the crack of a rifle from the mist ahead. The Lieutenant heaved a sigh of relief. “Keep down,” he said. “Work along this trench edge. Sure to lead to the front line.”

A new hope flooded him. There was stillthe front trench to cross, but the ease with which they had first come over it made him now, turning the prospect over in his mind as he crawled, consider that difficulty with a light heart. His own trench and his friends began to seem very near. Crossing the neutral ground, which at other times would have loomed as a dangerous adventure, was nothing after this hair-raising performance of blundering about inside the German lines. He moved with certainty and confidence, although yet with the greatest caution. Twice they came to a belt of wire running down to the edges of the trench they followed. The Lieutenant, after a brief pause to look and listen, slid down into the trench, passed the wire, climbed out again, always with Studd close behind him. Once they lay flat on the very edge of the trench and watched a German pass along beneath them so close they could have put a hand on his helmet. Once more they crouched in a shell-hole while a dozen men floundered along the trench. And so they came at last to the front line. Foot by foot they wriggled close up to it.The Lieutenant at first saw no sign of a German, but Studd beside him gripped his arm with a warning pressure, and the Lieutenant lay motionless. Suddenly, what he had taken to be part of the outline of the parapet beyond the trench moved and raised, and he saw the outline of a steel-helmeted head and a pair of broad shoulders. The man turned his head and spoke, and with a shock the Lieutenant heard a murmur of voices in the trench, saw figures stir and move in the mist. Studd wriggled noiselessly closer and, with his lips touching the Lieutenant’s ear, whispered “I know where we are. Remember this bit we’re on. We crossed to the left of here.”

They backed away from the trench a little and worked carefully along it to their left, and presently Studd whispered, “About here, I think.” They edged closer in, staring across for sight of the silhouette of the rifle butt above the parapet. The mist had grown thicker again and the parapet showed no more than a faint grey bulk against the lighter grey. The trench appeared to be fullof men—“standing to” the Lieutenant supposed they were—and they moved at the most appalling risk, their lives hanging on their silence and stealth, perhaps on the chance of some man climbing back out of the trench. The Lieutenant was shivering with excitement, his nerves jumping at every movement or sound of a voice from the trench beside them.

Studd grasped his elbow again and pointed to the broken edge of trench where they lay, and the Lieutenant, thinking he recognised the spot they had climbed out on their first crossing, stared hard across to the parapet in search of the rifle butt. He saw it at last. But what lay between it and them? Were there Germans crouching in the trench bottom? But they must risk that, risk everything in a dash across and over the parapet. A puff of wind stirred and set the mist eddying and lifting a moment. They dare wait no longer. If the wind came the mist would go, and with it would go their chance of crossing the No Man’s Land. He whispered a moment to Studd, sat up, twisted hislegs round to the edge of the trench, slid his trench dagger from its sheath and settled his fingers to a firm grip on the handle, took a deep breath, and slid over feet foremost into the trench. In two quick strides he was across it and scrambling up the parapet. The trench here was badly broken down and a muddy pool lay in the bottom. Studd caught a foot in something and splashed heavily, and a voice from a yard or two on their left called sharply. The Lieutenant slithering over the parapet heard and cringed from the shot he felt must come. But a voice to their right answered; the Lieutenant slid down, saw Studd scramble over after, heard the voices calling and answering and men splashing in the trench behind them. He rose to his feet and ran, Studd following close. From the parapet behind came the spitting bang of a rifle and the bullet whipped past most uncomfortably close. It would have been safer perhaps to have dropped to shelter in a shell-hole and crawled on after a reasonable wait, but the Lieutenant had had enough of crawling and shell-holes forone night, and was in a most single-minded hurry to get away as far and as fast as he could from Germans’ neighbourhood. He and Studd ran on, and no more shots followed them. The mist was thinning rapidly, and they found their own outposts in the act of withdrawal to the trench. The Lieutenant hurried past them, zigzagged through their own wire, and with a gasp of relief jumped down into the trench. He sat there a few minutes to recover his breath and then started along the line to find Headquarters and make his report.

On his way he met the officer who had watched them leave the trench and was greeted with a laugh. “Hullo, old cock. Some mud! You look as if you’d been crawling a bit. See any Boche?”

“Crawling!” said the Lieutenant. “Any Boche! I’ve been doing nothing but crawl for a hundred years—except when I was squirming on my face. And I’ve been falling over Boche, treading on Boche, bumping into Boche, listening to Boche remarks—oh,ever since I can remember,” and he laughed, just a trifle hysterically.

“Did you get over their line then? If so, you’re just back in time. Mist has clean gone in the last few minutes.” A sudden thought struck the Lieutenant. He peered long and carefully over the parapet. The last wisps of mist were shredding away and the jumble of torn ground and trenches and wire in the German lines was plainly visible. “Look,” said the Lieutenant. “Three or four hundred yards behind their line—hanging on some wire. That’s my coat....”

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