At the end of the week “A” Company went into trenches upon the gently rising downland nearly two miles north-east of Albert. Phillip looked across a no-man’s land of tall grasses, thistles, docks, and wild flowers and saw—nothing: no movement, no sign of life. Half a mile away was a village of skeleton roofs, and some trees in leaf, forsaken upon a fossilised chalky landscape, void of life and movement. Yet the pale summer sky of morning was suspended in a feeling of terror: within the delusion of forsakenness a thousand hidden eyes watched with the invisible sharpness of death. The sniper’s bullet cracked as it passed faster than sound, sometimes sparkling at night upon the chalk-filled bags of the parapet—the bleached and grey hessian bags, some broken with rot, with fatigue, and not renewed; for their purpose was almost served.

The British front line lay upon a plateau one hundred metres above sea-level. It faced the German lines on the slope, rising imperceptibly past the two fortified villages of Ovillers and La Boisselle to the horizon of one hundred and forty metres, where lay, beyond periscope visibility, the third enemy line. Behind and hidden below that downland crest the towers of Bapaume arose in open country between the rivers Somme and Scarpe. There, he thought, was the open country awaited by the cavalry for more than a year now.

There were moments when Phillip’s imagination overwhelmed him. He wanted to feel all the excitations, the hopes, the determinations, the fears of every soldier in khaki and feld-grau. With fascination, with glamour, with occasional tremulous thoughts of glory, he imagined the hundreds of thousands of hidden men, dusty with chalk, in khaki on the one side, mingled with an equal fascination of curiosity and romantic wonder about, and innocent pity for, the hundreds of thousands of men in coal-scuttle helmets and feld-grau on the opposite side—men lost to home upon that ancient bed of the sea raised by elemental cataclysm aeons since. Father Aloysius had said that there had always been war; that the surface of the earth would not be fertile without death and decay. Beyond such seeming destruction was the harmony of God, striving that men should see clearer, and live happier, according to their true natures. The eternal processes of decay and redemption had never ceased; they were eternal. He imagined the rain falling under the ocean winds from the south-west, and dripping through the chalk, to break out upon the hillsides as springs of water which, falling, falling, falling to the sea, widened the valleys in whose sides and upon whose plateaux, at that very moment of time passing through his brain, millions of men were digging and tunnelling, one race against another, reinforcing shelters above ground with concrete and steel, protecting them with barbed-wire strung on angle-iron and screw-picket, behind which machine-guns, mortars, gas cylinders and flame-throwers were hidden from view, in chalk-bagged bay and traverse, against blast; steep wooden steps leading down through timber-framed doorways to rooms and corridors panelled with wood, as in the flash of a torch he had seen during a static moment of raging hot coolness during a raid to get a prisoner for identification: a raid carried out in silence on both sides until Mills bombs had been lobbed down dark rectangular holes below the German parapet, ominous with wooden steps disappearing down into—what? Back! Back! he relived the moment with thin tense steel-wire fear, as a prisoner, gibbering and slavering, was kicked and prodded out of the deep trench, a young soldier with shaven head laced with blood after being hit by an entrenching-tool handle enwound and weighted at the end with barbed wire. What had happened? Where were the other Germans?

They had crept across no-man’s land, guided by little posts, in the split tops of which hens’ feathers had been stuck. They had known the way by feeling the quill-ends; they had got into the trench, without a shot being fired; they had scrambled back, ripping hands, sleeves, trousers, puttees on trip-strands of loose wire, swearing with fear and interior galvanic flashes of terror in illumination from the bursting of green and red rockets over no-man’s land, rising above scores of calcium flares, soaring up from the German lines, a moment before sheet-lightning from the east told that the German protective barrage had started, to add coarse buzzing and swishing of howitzer and field-gun shells, with red-stabbings of rifle fire from ground-level and distant flashless enfilade of machine-guns firing north across Mash Valley from Y Sap just over the Bapaume road, also from higher ground in front of Ovillers. When he got back or rather fell into the British front trench he could not speak, his throat being dried up and partly closed, while the sweat from his armpits soaked the arms of his flannel shirt almost to the wrists; but the release from fear was exhilarating, the feeling of being alive most wonderful; for all of the raiding party had returned safely, bringing the prisoner, who had held up his hands in supplication, that his life be spared. He was very young, and soon calmed down, on being given a drink and a smoke, despite Divisional Routine Orders, while waiting to be sent down under guard to Brigade headquarters.

“The new C.O. is expected tonight,” said Bason, “and the Adj. wants to hold the prisoner, who won’t be seen by Army Intelligence anyway until tomorrow morning. I’ve sent your report down. By the way, Major Kingsman wants to see you at the Post.”

“What about, skipper?”

“Search me. He’s just telephoned. That’s all I know.”

Major Kingsman’s headquarters were in the support trenches six hundred yards behind the firing line, at the cross-roads known as Ovillers Post. Behind the Post the road led on down to Aveluy village across the river marshes, a mile north of Albert.

Major Kingsman was standing behind a hurricane lamp at a table in a dugout four steps below the grassy surface outside. He said “Well done”, and then he said towards the haze of the hurricane lamp, “This is the officer who was in charge of the raiding party, Colonel. Mr. Maddison.”

“Thank you, Major Kingsman. Will you be ready to go round the lines with me in half an hour, please? Sit down, will you?” said a voice spoken through jaws nearly closed.

His sight still dazed behind smarting eyeballs, Phillip sat on a ration box. Across the table was a figure with a black patch over one eye, and a pink scar drawing together the flesh below it. The hand of the arm laid on the blanket-covered trestle-table was hidden under a black glove; and around the wrist of the black hand was a strap with swivel, which could be fastened to a ring on the tunic. He had a glimpse of a silver rosette upon the riband of the Military Cross, and looking up, saw a pale blue eye in a pallid face.

The black hand pushed over an enamel mug, a voice said “You need a drink; help yourself, Phillip,” which was another shock on this night of shocks, so that he felt that his life floated unreal in waves of remote nothingness. He was unable to speak or to move. The reaction to intense stimulation was still upon him. He held up the mug of whiskey and chlorinated soda water with shaking hand, and then he felt tears running down his cheeks, why, he did not know, other than that he could not believe that he was in the presence of “Spectre” West. He drank, and the mug was taken from his hand.

“Have some more.”

The Sparkler syphon hissed. The mug was put before him. He drank, and began to feel his glassy self thawing.

“I want to hear about your raid, Phillip.”

“Very good, sir.”

While he was trying to speak coherently there was a commotion outside. A sergeant’s face leaned down and said, “Beg pardon, sir, but the prisoner’s in a fit, sir.”

The prisoner lay with bitten tongue, and snoring; he recovered for a moment some minutes later, and sat up, to glance wildly around and to cry “Mutter, Mutter” before dropping back and lying still. When the doctor arrived, he felt the prisoner’s pulse; then with his stethoscope confirmed that the heart was not beating.

“Too bad he died on us before he could be interrogated,” said the doctor, adding, “Otherwise the only good Hun is a dead one.”

“Bloody fool!” muttered the Colonel, as the M.O. left. Then Phillip was asked questions, before a trench map spread upon the table. He was asked about the direction of machine-gun lines of fire, direct or indirect. He was told that observers in the trench and behind it had been trying to spot them, but no flashes had been seen. The Spandau guns were thought to have been firing down pipes, from fixed positions behind the front line, and from the strong point to the south called Y Sap. While the questions were being asked, Captain Milman came into the dug-out.

“I’ll be ready to come round with you in ten minutes, Captain Milman. I want to talk to this officer alone, if you please.”

Captain Milman looked surprised at the curt tone of voice, and went out again. Then “Spectre” West, his eyes fixed on Phillip’s face, began again, somewhat curtly, to ask more questions. How long before he had gone over had he known of the raid? Had any details been discussed or imparted by telephone from battalion headquarters to his company commander’s dug-out? Had any been telegraphed on the buzzer? Had he seen any Hun sentries in the trench? Had any stick-grenades been thrown? Any rifles fired?

“I didn’t hear any, Colonel.”

“It looks as though they knew of the raid. The question is, how?”

Captain Milman came back. He bowed to the Colonel as he saluted, and smiled at Phillip.

“I’ve sent in a report about the raid to the Brigade-major, sir.”

“Spectre” West said evenly, “In future it will be my reports that will go to Brigade, Captain Milman.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“I think, too, that, except on parade, I would prefer to be addressed by all my officers as ‘Colonel’.”

“Certainly, Colonel.”

“That, I need not say, will not appear in orders.”

“Certainly not, Colonel.”

“Now will you be good enough to ask the Brigade-major, from me, if someone from Army Intelligence can be sent here to identify the dead prisoner as soon as possible?”

“The Brigade-major has already asked me to get the kadaver down to Albert tonight, Colonel. Intelligence from Army is coming to examine details tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? God’s teeth! Why not tonight?”

When Captain Milman had gone, “Spectre” West said, “I want to ask you a particular question, a personal question. I have a reason for asking it. It is this. Why did you tell ‘Crasher’ Orlebar that you were up at Cambridge University before the war?”

Phillip remained silent.

“It was untrue, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“You didn’t feel good enough, did you? So you pretended?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Well, you are damned well good enough!” shouted “Spectre” West in sudden rage. “You are an Englishman! You were in the Gaultshire Regiment! You fought at First Ypres! You are good enough, and do not need lies to bolster up your fancied feelings of not being good enough! Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“But I know how you felt,” said West, reflectively. “You need not think you are the only one.”

*

The air of night under the stars was being charged by a magnetic awareness that drew up the larks which lived upon the battlefield to rise above the calcium flares. It was not yet three o’clock. A thick mist lay upon the valley of the Ancre. The guns were for the moment silent. Only occasional rifle-fire sheared flatly in the distance; spinning shapeless richochets fell with chromatic piping sounds into the marshes.

Phillip was instantly awake when a hand touched his shoulder.

“The goddess Aurora,” said “Spectre” West, in a whisper. They stood together outside the shelter, looking towards the east. “The pale brow of Aurora.” He added, “Pale with sight at the bloody filth of Mars. All this has happened before. What a pity you were not at the ’varsity. You should have read Greats.”

“Look!” said Phillip, “that lark up there has a red breast. I am sure they fly to see the sun, when they go up at dawn. ‘Bird of the wilderness, blithesome and cumberless’.”

“Yes, cumberless. That is what the infantry should be on Z morning, not line upon line of pedlars.”

When the last lark was back in the wilderness grasses again, Phillip was drinking tea with “Spectre” West, whose face in daylight looked if anything more marmoreal than by candle. He wondered if “Spectre” had been cured of his dope-taking; and remembered Dr. Dashwood saying that topers and drug-takers who had been cured lost some of their old personality, their minds became slower, their thinking involved, together with their talking. Dashwood had made a joke about it. What they lose on the swigs, Middleton, they gain on round-about talk. It did not seem so funny now.

“Did you think of letting a Mills bomb, without its detonator, roll down the steps of one of those Hun dug-outs? You did not. You did not think to meet silence with silence, on the principle of softly, softly catchee monkey? Comparative silence, of course. Bompity-bompity-bompity! all the way home, otherwise to the bottom of the steps, while you counted the number of bompity-bomps? What, you weren’t ordered to count the steps? Of course you weren’t! Why should you be? Who knows anything but damn-all about anything in the line, except P.B.I.? You should have taken that priceless opportunity, as you went down, to find out the depth of the Hun’s fortress shelters. In future raids in this battalion will be made in plimsolls, by thieves and cut-throats, not by officers imitating hearties smashing glass at a Bullingdon dinner. We’ll have another dart at them, but I doubt if the old Hun will be so obliging a second time. I’ll have to get the B’grdear’s approval, but if he won’t give it, we’ll take out a strong patrol and get it lost the wrong side of the wire.”

Phillip heard this with misgiving.

“How long have you known this battalion?”

“I’ve only rejoined less than a fortnight, Colonel.”

“Is it the same battalion you wrote to me about, when you were at Northampton? When Frances came down?”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Drop the ‘colonel’ when we are alone. I speak to you as to an old comrade. You are a second-lieutenant: my substantive rank is lieutenant. Otherwise I am merely a temporary captain with the ephemeral rank of lieutenant-colonel. And apart from that, I know damn-all about what is behind the Hun wire. G.H.Q. knows damn-all. Aeroplane photographs are deceptive. They give an illusion that much, if not all, can be reconstructed from them. But they don’t tell what we want urgently to know. For example, the Hun’s probably got listening apparatus that picks up our telephone talks. He must have, otherwise why the suddenly evacuated front trench, and that idiot left alone there? Of course he may have unexpectedly thrown a fit, and they left him there, after cutting off his shoulder numerals, and taking his identity disc and papers. I wouldn’t put it past the Hun to have cleared out and left him there, from a misplaced sense of humour.”

“He was crying when we got into the trench.”

“Poor little sod.”

“Spectre” West took up a dossier of operation orders. “You’ve seen the battalion orders for the attack?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think of them?”

“I don’t really know, except that they seem to be part of an ordered scheme.”

“Oh, for God’s sake——! Must you talk in clichés? I suppose you don’t know what a cliché is? Well, it’s a stereotyped phrase, which old compositors, in the days of picking out type in single letters, kept made up, to save time. ‘A wedding was solemnised’, ‘the contracting parties were …’—that sort of thing. So no clichés of thought or phrase with me, if you please. Here’s a book for you. It’s the Everyman edition of Smith’s Smaller Classical Dictionary.”

“Thank you ever so much.”

The colonel’s servant brought in another pot of tea. He wore Gaultshire badges. “Good morning, sir. Permission to say, sir, very pleased to see you again, sir.” It was Boon, last seen when “Spectre” had been hit at Loos. Phillip shook him by the hand. When Boon had gone, “Spectre” said,

“You must forgive my sharpness, Phillip. I have been an usher too long. Now I want to know what you really think. You saw what happened at Loos. Haig’s orders were for every brigade to get out into the blue as fast as it could, and if Sir John French hadn’t kept back the Guards Division and other reserves, the Hun might have had to pull back to the Scheldt, and the war been over by Christmas. Now, this time, it is the opposite principle; limited advances to be made at a slow but steady pace, wave behind wave; every man having a special job, like the caste system in India, and incidentally carrying over sixty pounds. The idea is to be ready to meet the counter-attack from the Pozières ridge, and smash it. Then the cavalry passes through the gap, to hold the ground beyond Bapaume until the infantry can come up and break out, and roll up the Hun’s flanks. Are you listening?”

“Yes, sir, of course!”

“To all objections by local commanders, Army replies, in effect, ‘But me no buts’. The enemy positions will be rendered untenable and the Germans in them ‘wiped out’ by the preliminary bombardment. Those were the very words used by Rawlinson at the Corps Commanders’ conference at Querrieu yesterday. You will of course keep what I have told you strictly between us two.”

“Yes, I promise.”

*

While he had been sleeping in headquarters dug-out the previous night, the kadaver in feld-grau was carried on a stretcher, amidst oaths and whizz-bangs, down to Albert. There, at 10 a.m. the next morning, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs with bacon and devilled kidneys, followed by toast, Oxford marmalade, farmhouse butter and coffee with fresh (not tinned) milk, three A.I.D. officers arrived in a Vauxhall motor-car, to try and identify from the kadaver’s remains the German regiment holding the sector opposite Usna Hill. Since neither shoulder numerals, letters, nor identity disc were available, they held what they called a sartorial post-mortem; and decided that, according to the kadaver’s tunic, he was a Bavarian; from his trousers he was a Saxon; his shirt made him a Prussian from Wurtemburg, his boots a Swabian from Pomerania; his socks gave no clue to identity, since he was not wearing any; he had a five-pfennig piece in one pocket and so (ran the joke in No. 2 mess later) he must have been a Scotsman.

Comic Cuts, the Corps Intelligence broadsheet, did not mention the raid. There was, however, an indirect reference to it.

Phillip got back to Keats Redan by the communication trench, and reported to Captain Bason in the support line as a smell of frying bacon was coming from the servant’s shelter next door. “Just in time, old sport,” said Bason, cheerfully. “What happened last night? Did you have a binge? I hear the new C.O. can put it away. What’s he like?”

“He’s Frances West’s cousin! My friend I told you about!”

Bason looked sideways and said, “See any green in my eye?” and maintained a sceptical attitude until Phillip overcame the nuisance of his manner and made him listen to his story, while keeping back ‘Spectre’s’ confidences and saying nothing about the raid being repeated; but he wondered if he had said too much as soon as he had replied to Bason’s question, “Was Brigade pleased about the raid?” with “It was a failure, like all the others on the Corps front, I heard”; for thereupon Bason became indignant about ‘the bloody brass-hats moaning about failure, just because the prisoner was a ponkey and had kicked the bucket’.

“They ordered us to go Hun-pinching and you did it, didn’t you? Anyway, I’ve put you in for the M.C.”

Phillip was too astonished to say anything but, “Well, skipper, I think I’ll go and have a look at my platoon, then if it’s all right with you, I’ll come back and get some breakfast.”

“You’re very keen all of a sudden, old sport. Come and tuck in now, it’s all ready.”

After enjoying a breakfast of bacon, fried bread and coffee, with tinned butter and marmalade to follow, Phillip went down the communication trench, passing painted signs on stakes driven into the chalk, and brass 18-pounder shell-cases used for gas-gongs, and came to the front line, where men were shaving, cooking breakfast bacon on tins of solidified spirit, cleaning rifles, writing letters, in an atmosphere of cheerfulness induced by the haze of the morning sun. One man in twelve was on look-out duty with a periscope above the parapet of chalk-filled bags.

He sat down on the fire-step, asking about their rations, particularly bread; the daily ration was 1¼ lb. per man, but they seldom got more than half a 1-lb. loaf each in the line; and if the water tasted of too much petrol; if letters were arriving all right from home, and separation allowances being paid to their families?

“When do us go over the plonk, sir?” asked the platoon sergeant, who came from the West Country.

“I don’t know any more than you chaps.”

“Any chance of home leaf after the push, sir?”

“I hope so.”

“The gunners have a rumour we are going to Verdun, sir. Is it true?”

“More likely that Jerry’s coming up here.”

“Are we down-hearted?” cried someone.

“No!” they shouted.

“They say you knew the new C.O. before, sir.”

“Yes, I did, at Loos. He’s the finest officer I know.”

“A fire-eater, sir?”

“No. A real soldier. I’d follow him anywhere, so will you.”

“Why was Jerry silent last night, sir?”

“Perhaps we caught them all with their trousers down.”

That made them laugh. He left them, and went to his shelter, The Demi-Lune, made of curved elephant iron covered by three layers of bags, and entering past the gas-blanket, found Pimm his servant sitting by a steaming kettle. Telling him that he had had breakfast, Phillip lay down on a mattress of sandbag bundles, and thinking of a purple-and-white riband on his tunic, settled contentedly to sleep … until he recalled ‘Spectre’s’ words, and remained with his eyes open.

Getting up after an unrestful half hour, he asked Captain Bason’s permission to go down the sappers’ mine-gallery. For months the Royal Engineers had been driving a gallery under the German position opposite, where the northern shoulder of the salient made by the enemy’s trenches around La Boisselle, known as Y sap, was a strongpoint of reinforced concrete forts with splayed slits at ground level holding machine-guns. Y sap was to be blown up just before the infantry assault on Z day.

“I’ve seen the sapper subaltern, and he says he’ll take me down.”

“You must want a job, old sport. You wouldn’t get me going anywhere near the Glory Hole for a hundred quid!”

Phillip set off for the main shaft of the tunnel, with two ideas in his mind: to enquire if the sappers knew the depth of the German dugouts; and to find out if, by some extraordinary bit of luck, Desmond had been posted there. After all, he had never expected to see Westy; it was a small world.

South of Keats Redan the British front line ended in a barricade of sandbags laid header-and-stretcher, a dozen courses high and two courses thick. The barricade was usually riddled by day, and rebuilt at night. Here, across no-man’s-land, the German front line turned back east along rising ground. The white scar of trench lay beside the Bapaume Road for a quarter of a mile, before returning north again across a shallow valley in the downland imperceptibly rising to a skyline of 110 metres. This slight hollow between two spurs was known as Mash Valley, up which the battalion was to advance on Z day.

Through a periscope Phillip looked out over no-man’s-land, as he had many times before, with fascination and wonder for its human lifelessness. To leave the trench and advance over the open was something that thought broke down upon; yet one day it would have to happen.

Far away on the skyline, beyond two diminishing lines of trees marking the straight road to Bapaume, he could see a faint serration of roof-tops: Pozières, the final objective on Z day.

Pozières was two and a half miles distant. He could get there in three minutes on his motor cycle, if by some miracle every one of the hundreds of thousands living underground suddenly were to be lifted away, if the shell-holes and trenches were filled in, and the wire removed in the same instant, and all become as it was before 1914. Vain thought: the seasons of the world had changed: summer was harsh and bright and meaningless; winter cold and wet and pitiless; spring was a time for the greater activity of death; autumn for the dissolution of bodies into the soil, under the little hammers of the rain.

If only he could stop thinking like that: if only he could enjoy the moment, as Bason did, and most of the other fellows: if he could feel as Kingsman felt, serene because he believed in God, that what was to happen was inevitable, and so all things must be accepted cum aequo animo. Did prayer really help? But first you must believe. He did not know what he believed; first he believed one thing, then another.

*

To the right of the Bapaume road the salient in front of La Boisselle projected like a shattered reef of white coral upon a grim and empty prospect of grey. Here upon the white reef of the German lines had burst storm upon storm, until immense troughs and crests of waves, expended, lay as though fossilised in Time.

The Glory Hole was a litter of skulls on which tufts of hair remained, beside puttees coiled upon air and leather knee-boots empty save for each a bone; of charred fragments of cloth, once khaki or grey, sewn with buttons now black with sulphurous fumes, embossed with the Royal Coat-armour of Great Britain and Ireland, or the Imperial Crown of Prussia above the Gothic letter W. The Glory Hole was no charnel-house, for all flesh had long since leached into the chalk; it was a boneyard without graves, an uninhabited area making a gap of five hundred yards in the British line, an abandoned no-man’s-land of choked shaft and subsided gallery held by a series of Lewis-gun posts. Nature was trying to return here, with thin, one-stalk weeds of poppy and charlock, and those other plants of the wilderness, ragwort and dock.

In the Glory Hole lay many British shells, of the largest calibres, which had failed to explode on impact. Observers upon the Fourth Army front had been reporting that one, sometimes two, and occasionally three of a salvo of four shells fired by the Corps siege artillery were duds.

KEEP LOW
SNIPER

said a notice board, for the German front line was less than a hundred yards’ distant from the barricade beside the road. Suddenly the grey sea rushed, the wave broke; the shock was like an interior explosion; Phillip sat down while little triangles and splinters of looking-glass tinkled down. He threw down the shattered periscope and hurried away, remembering that this was Minnie Corner—the minenwerfer wobbling up into the air, the dreaded oil-drums filled with ammonal turning over and over, falling with smoking fuse visible as sparks at night, like a Chinese cracker: thump, on the chalk; silence; then in a vast flash everything blown flat and sideways. The Germans sent them up in home-made wooden mortars like long thin barrels bound with wire; he laughed as he imagined Heath Robinson figures running away solemnly as soon as they had lit the charge with a candle, for if the wooden barrel burst before the drum left, the present to Tommy would deliver itself backwards.

*

“I’ll have to ask you to remove your boots when we’re farther down the sap,” said the lieutenant of Engineers, leading the way down the shaft with an Oerlix flashlamp. “And no talking, please. No smoking, either. We have to move slowly, especially at the face of the gallery, to conserve the oxygen in the air. We’ve had several cases of mine-gas poisoning.”

There were three separate shafts leading to the gallery, for safety. Wooden steps went down into a series of tunnels, some of which appeared to be store caverns. The main gallery led away south. It was low and narrow; he had to bend down, feeling direction with his fingertips on the walls, elbows well in, the gallery being only thirty inches wide. He was glad to stop in a bay cut into one wall, where candles had made the chalk smoky. Here puttees, boots, and socks were taken off.

The floor of the gallery from here onwards was laid with sand-bags. He was sweating, and his back aching when they rested in another bay, where the sapper officer whispered that soon they would be crossing the line of a counter-mine the Germans had been digging until ten days before, when all sound of picking had stopped.

Phillip knew enough about mining and counter-mining to know that this might mean the blowing-in of the gallery any moment. “Camouflet or stifler no bon,” he said, making a joke of it.

“We’ve got a listening set continuously manned, we’ll be passing it soon.”

Padding on the sand-bags, on which his big toes sometimes fluffed, and sweating in the close air, they came to a bay lit by a candle stuck in an alcove in the wall, where a man in shirt-sleeves was sitting, back to bag-upholstered wall, reading a book, headphones over ears with wires leading into a box beside him.

“That’s the C.R.E.’s new pet gadget—he calls it a ‘geophone’,” whispered the subaltern.

The listening man lifted his eyes from the book, made a washout movement with one hand, then went on reading. When Phillip bent to find out what the book was, the listener held it up, open at the title page for him to see; he nodded as though with anticipatory appreciation. It was The Egoist, by George Meredith, an author Phillip knew only from a poem in one of his younger sister Doris’ school-books, Love in the Valley, which was pretty good, with true descriptions of a barn owl flying, and a nightjar reeling above the bracken on Reynard’s Common, sitting along a branch of a silver birch. But he could not read such things, or think of them, out of England.

After a long time, it seemed, the tunnel became slightly wider, and they came upon men sitting on the floor, silently passing back a solitary sand-bag as carefully as if they were middle-aged devotees of some secret baby-cult. The sand-bag was laid, with extreme care, on another bag stacked with others beside one wall. The sapper officer put finger to lip before creeping forward, very slowly, to the end of the gallery.

Two men only were standing at the face of the chalk. One held a carpenter’s wooden auger. He turned it with extreme caution several times, before pulling out the bit slowly, for the chalky droppings to be caught by his mate, in cupped hands, beside him. The droppings were put into a sand-bag held open by a third man sitting on the floor. A fourth man then gave the second man a bottle, which was tilted into the auger hole. When the liquid had been in about a minute—while everyone waited in complete silence—it was then scraped out in the form of chalky paste, with the aid of a long thin wooden scoop. Then the boring began again, as slowly and silently.

*

When they were up in the trench again, in dazzling light, the sapper subaltern explained that the gallery was one thousand and thirty feet in length, which brought it directly under the German fort at Y Sap. The extreme caution was necessary, he said, because of what had happened recently when the 183rd Tunnelling Company had been mining Russian saps, to provide covered communications across no-man’s-land into the German front trench—“The idea of these is to blow the ends in by small charges, for the infantry to debouch through at Zero hour. This particular sap was considerably deeper than the others, and the chap pushing the auger at the chalk face suddenly staggered forward, the point of the bit having unexpectedly penetrated a Hun officer’s dug-out.”

“Good God!”

“Fortunately our men are Tynesiders, miners in peace-time, and were on their toes. They saw what had happened, and stood absolutely still. The bit had come through the last of the chalk, and was up against the upright deal planks lining the dug-out, with a couple of inches of air-space in between wood and chalk, to act as a buffer I suppose. The old Hun didn’t suspect anything, and there’s a hundred pounds of ammonal tamped in at the end of that particular Russian sap at this moment, ready for Zero hour.”

“How deep was the dug-out?”

“Well, our sap was thirty feet down, deep enough to prevent it being blown in by all but the heaviest howitzer shells.”

“Has that been reported? I mean, that the Hun dug-out roofs are thirty feet down?”

“I don’t think a point was specially made about it in the report.”

Thanking his host, and inviting him to call and have a mug of whiskey and a slice of plum cake in the company dug-out when he passed that way, Phillip hurried back to Captain Bason, who was seated at a table signing returns with the company clerk, a lance-corporal.

“I say, I think I ought to see the C.O. at once, skipper.”

Captain Bason went on writing. Then, after some time he said, “What about, old sport?”

“I think I have something he will want to know, rather urgently. It’s really a sort of private matter between us.”

Ray, who was in the shelter, said, “Don’t tell me you’ve got the job of private bum-boy already?”

Ignoring this remark, Phillip said, when Captain Bason continued to write upon the paper before him, “Well, I didn’t mean exactly private, but I think I’ve found out something the C.O. wants to know.”

“You don’t say!” replied Bason, good-naturedly. “What do you know that only a colonel should know? By the way, he was round here while you were on your Cook’s tour, with Kingsman and Milman, and asked where you were.”

Before Ray could say anything further, Captain Bason went on, “Ray, go round to the C.S.M. and check up the trench stores that we’ll have to hand over when we go back to Querrieu. Come along in, corporal. See that these returns go down to Ovillers Post with the ration party this evening.”

When the corporal had followed Ray out of the shelter, Bason said, “Now then, what’s the trouble, young Phil?”

“I think I may be on to something the C.O. wants to know rather urgently.”

“Then it’s personal? Nothing about the battalion?”

“In a way, it concerns the battalion. But he told me in confidence.”

Looking at him sideways, with narrowed eyes, Bason said, “Can’t I, as your company commander, know about something that concerns the battalion?”

“Well, skipper, I think Col. West ought to know it first.”

“If that doesn’t take the biscuit! Who the bloody hell d’you think you are?”

Phillip had not seen Bason looking before as he was looking now. The amiable, easy face, with the long thin brown moustache, untrained and untrimmed, had a look of a stubborn pink pig standing motionless, its eyes fixed sideways and upward. “If you can’t tell me, as your company commander, then I’m b—d if I’ll let you go sucking up to the Colonel, just because you knew him socially before you joined this regiment! Who the hell d’you think you are? What’s the idea? Want to push out Milman as adjutant? Why, you’re only a wart, and under my orders, and don’t you forget it! You’ll bloody well stop with your platoon until I bloody well tell you to go, and anything you have to report, you’ll report to me! Now clear off back to your post, and let’s have no more bloody nonsense from you!”

Standing to attention, Phillip said, “Sir! I request permission to see the Commanding Officer.”

“I’ll bloody well put you under arrest if you don’t bloody well obey my orders!” shouted Captain Bason, rising from the table. “Push off!”

“Very good, sir!”

He went back to his platoon.

Two hours later a company runner came and said he was wanted at Coy. Headquarters. There Captain Bason told him he was to report at Battn. H.Q. The skipper eyed him keenly, saying, “Now look out what you’re about! No talking out of school, mind!”

“Of course not, sir.”

“G’r’rt yer!” said Bason, imitating George Robey’s famous remark in The Bing Boys at the Alhambra. “G’r’rt yer! Come back later and tell us all about it.”

Phillip was glad that the Bason was his old self again.

*

Boon brought in burnt corks and ‘Spectre’ West praised Phillip for his information, but said more definite evidence was required, and that the Brigadier had already approved his plan of trying to get into the Boche trench opposite. A box barrage was to be put round the sector at seven minutes past midnight for four minutes. Shrapnel and high-explosive from field guns would plaster the front line, leaving the section to be entered unshelled until the last two minutes. Then all batteries would put down a barrage from 12.9 a.m. until 12.11 a.m. That would get the Hun garrison down into the dug-outs. Meanwhile flanking parties would occupy shell-holes and sweep the rear lines while a party of picked men, cricketers all, would get into the front line. They would be armed with Mills bombs, daggers, and knobkerries. They would have blacked faces, and wear wash-leather bags over their boots.

Two parties, each under a sergeant, would get along the trench, from both sides of the centre of the chosen sector, and form bombing blocks. “Your centre party will carry these experimental grenades of yellow phosphorus. You will detail men to stand by three dugout entrances. The grenades will be thrown down the two outside shafts, leaving the middle shaft un-bombed. The phosphorus will release dense white smoke, and choke any Hun below. They might still be able to fight, but there is no question of a fight. The sole purpose of your entry into the Boche line is to find out how deep the dug-outs are. You yourself will descend the middle shaft, wearing a P.H.G. helmet. This has special eye-pieces set in rubber sponge. It will have been soaked in a concentrated solution of sodium bicarbonate, to counter the fumes of diphosphorus pentoxide.”

“Very good, sir.”

“I repeat:—The sole purpose of the raid is to enable a descent to be made down the steps of one dug-out. You are to count each step going down, and again on coming up. Visibility for your descent will be provided by strontium flares. These flares on being tossed down the central shaft will burn red and give the effect of the dug-out being on fire. Any Boche below will, at first, keep clear of that entrance. When you have come up, a sergeant will go down, to check your count. Meanwhile the space between the top ledges will be measured, to get an average measurement of the drop between each ledge. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Phillip left a letter, to be posted to his mother, if he did not come back. In it he put some pimpernels and speedwells picked from around Ovillers Post.

*

It took two hours to get into position, crawling and resting, by the gap through the German wire. Singing in chorus came from the trenches in front. It was drowned when the barrage opened up with its intensive summer lightning over the valley behind, followed by the shriek and score of air. Red stars burst in the sky, arcs of fire opened in the German lines, while Lt.-Col. West crawled from one black face to another, pressing the hand of each man.

Three streaks of fire arose from the German lines. Two broke into red balls, the third became a silver pheasant’s tail. Down fell the German barrage on their own parapet.

Phillip pushed himself flat, next to “Spectre” West. His eye was near a wan green dotted circle on the ground: the luminous wristlet watch strapped to the black wrist of the wooden hand.

He felt a strange exaltation. The light and clangour took away all feelings, so that he was a small centre of calmness.

They lay there for what seemed a very long time, until the British barrage stopped. The German barrage was still dropping. When it stopped, suddenly, they heard shouting coming from the dim white German parapet.

With hot-bowelling suddenness machine-gun bullets were cracking from groups of sparkles to left and right, all cutting across the German parapet, sweeping just in front of it from the left and from the right, so that some bullets seemed to be striking each other with extra large flashes. Then stabs of red came from the trench itself. The front line was held in strength.

They lay there until the firing died down, and singing once more arose up from the dug-outs.

*

“The Brocken,” said Lt.-Col. West at midnight, when they arrived at Battalion H.Q. “Or some other midsummer-eve festival. I don’t know much about German mythology, but I fancy they celebrate in the Hartz mountains with song and dance about this time. Well, I’ve been able to get on the right side of the Brigadier, but Division is strafing him. Corps wants to know why they weren’t told in advance. I suppose I’ll be returned to the Commanding Officers’ Pool.”

He pushed over mug, bottle, and siphon of chlorinated water. Phillip saw that his hand was shaky.

“But surely, sir, with your record——’

“My dear Phil, colonels are as common as peas in a bushel measure. One or another is degommé every day. One third of us get bad reports from our brigadiers.”

“Good lord!”

“Oh, stop being jejeune, for Christ’s sake! Everyone wants a scapegoat, and Corps is in very hot water already. Haig, I hear from the Brigadier, has complained that not one of the trench raids on its front has come off. Why? Because they’re held in strength. Why? Because the Boche knows our plans and realises they are based on illusion. If that illusion persists, the greatest slaughter in the history of the British Empire will occur on Z day!”

“Spectre” West emptied his mug of whiskey, and cried, “Were you bloody well telling lies again? Did you pick up that prisoner in no-man’s-land? Was he in their front line, as you said at the time? By all the angels of God, if you let me down, Phillip, I’ll have you shot!”

“I am sure the dug-out was very deep. It took me quite a time to go down, and then up again.”

“Then why didn’t you report its depth to Milman?”

“It didn’t seem important, then. I thought it must already be known. It was only when you made a special point of it, sir, that it occurred to me.”

A salvo of 5.9’s swooped over, making for the valley beyond.

“Spectre” West called to his servant to bring another bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a terrible lot, thought Phillip.

“You know, the entire future of Britain and the Empire depends on the success or failure of the coming battle. The flower of the British nation, all the ardour, guts, and intelligence of a generation which has volunteered to do its damndest for what it believes in—Great Britain, and all that the Pax Brittanica stands for throughout the world—under the proud words Ich Dien—is gathered here in Picardy. I must empty my bladder. Don’t go away.”

When he came back to the shelter he said, “How old are you, Phillip? Twenty-one? God, to be twenty-one again! The world in 1906, when I was up at Wadham, was from everlasting to everlasting, as Traherne wrote in his ‘Immortal Wheat’ passage. Now at twenty-nine I am a wreck, mental and physical. Do you know why? Shall I tell you?” He poured himself more whiskey.

“Steady on,” said Phillip, putting out a hand to take the bottle. “Please don’t have too much. I give you my word that I know that dug-out was very deep, if that’s any help.”

“Oh, I’m not thinking of that. Why didn’t you go and see my people at their pub in Lime Street, as you promised me when I was hit in front of Le Rutoire Farm last September? Does not your word mean anything to you? Or haven’t you got a word?”

“I saw your letter from the Duchess of Westminster’s hospital on the ante-room board, in which you wrote that you were hoping soon to rejoin the battalion, so I thought it wasn’t necessary.”

“You didn’t forget?”

“No, of course not!”

“Well, well, well,” muttered “Spectre”, staring at nothing. Phillip thought that he looked dreadfully ill. “I suppose Frances told you? No need to pretend, my lad. You don’t know? Well, here it is. I’ve been in love with her, my cousin once removed, since I came down from Oxford in ’09. Nothing doing.”

He looked at his mug of whiskey. On impulse Phillip took it, and put it at the other end of the table.

“You know,” went on the other, apparently not noticing, “I had a hell of a job to get back here again. I wouldn’t have had the hope of a snowflake in hell if ‘Nosey’ Orlebar hadn’t been at the War House. He got me posted to the seventh battalion, as second-in-command. Then I was offered a battalion.”

“May I be excused, Colonel? I must empty my bladder.”

He took the mug with him and swished the whiskey away. When he returned, “Spectre” West with elbows on table was saying to himself, “Bompity-bompity-bompity-bompity! A cricket ball would have done the trick. How many steps leading down? Bompity-bompity-bompity! How many bompity-bomps?”

“I can only repeat that the Mills’ reports were muffled and soft, but then I was standing six or seven yards away from the shaft. I could feel them, remote and dull, to be far under my feet, allowing for the fact that they were only Mills bombs.”

“That’s the kind of objectivity I want! Chalk is soft stuff, of course, and absorbs an explosion. If those dug-outs are more than seven to eight yards below the surface, then only a 12-inch or 15-inch howitzer shell can blow them in. And in confidence, mind!—as is everything I’m saying to you—there are only sixteen really heavy guns on the Corps front. One 15-inch and three 12-inch on railway mountings, and twelve 9.2’s. Sixteen heavies to poop off at dug-outs possibly eight metres deep underground, in soft, shock-absorbent chalk, honey-combing half a dozen lines of trenches along three thousand five hundred yards of Corps front. Divide three thousand five hundred by sixteen, and you have one dug-out-busting howitzer or gun to every two hundred and twenty yards of front. Multiply that a mile for depth, for raking back, that’s one heavy shell for one-eighth of a square mile. In that area will be scores of machine-gun teams down in those deep dug-outs, each team of which has practised bringing up its guns and mountings in pieces, to fit together as soon as the bombardment has lifted. Where will their targets be then? Six hundred yards distant from the muzzles of their Spandau guns! I tell you Fourth Army is MAD!” he shouted, banging the table with his fist. Then he uttered a long sigh and lay down on his bunk, face to the wall.

Phillip took the bottle from the table, and going outside, hurled it into the air. Then climbing out of the communication trench he walked beside it on his way to the line. Hearing the voice of the Brigadier coming down the trench, and since it was against orders to walk over the top, he cleared off before questions could be asked. Thank God he’d chucked away the bottle in time.