The Great Push E-Book

Patrick Macgill

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 272

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Patrick MacGill enlisted with the London Irish Rifles in 1915 and The Great Push is the resultant work, written during the Battle of Loos. This story recounts the fear, resilience, humour, and fatalism of those who fought at the raw edge of one of the most terrifying wars ever to have been waged. A classic of war literature, The Great Push is a passionate and compelling book which describes the fear, resilience, humour and fatalism of those who fought in the raw edge of one of the most terrifying wars ever to have been waged.

Leseprobe

THE GREAT PUSH

TO MARGARET

If we forget the Fairies,And tread upon their rings,God will perchance forget us,And think of other things.

When we forget you, Fairies,Who guard our spirits’ light:God will forget the morrow,And Day forget the Night.

This edition first published in 2000 by

Birlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburgh EH9 1QS

© Patrick MacGill

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

EBOOK ISBN 9780857903273

PRINT ISBN 9781841580364

Originally published by Herbert Jenkins

Subsequently published by Caliban Books17 South Hill Park GardensLondon, NW31984

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION

    FOREWORD

1  IN THE ADVANCE TRENCHES

2  OUT FROM NOUEX-LES-MINES

3  PREPARATIONS FOR LOOS

4  BEFORE THE CHARGE

5  OVER THE TOP

6  ACROSS THE OPEN

7  GERMANS AT LOOS

8  HOW MY COMRADES FARED

9  AT LOOS

10  NIGHT IN LOOS

11  LOOS

12  RETREAT

13  A PRISONER OF WAR

14  THE CHAPLAIN

15  A LOVER AT LOOS

16  THE RATION PARTY

17  MICHAELMAS EVE

18  BACK AT LOOS

19  WOUNDED

20  FOR BLIGHTY

INTRODUCTION

In August 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War, Patrick MacGill had already won considerable fame as the ‘navvy-poet’ and as the author of Children of the Dead End which had appeared earlier that year. This was the thinly fictionalised and vivid account of his early life in Donegal, his coming to Scotland as a potato picker, his life as a tramp, the hardships of work as a railway permanent-way labourer and his experiences as a navvy at the great Kinlochleven hydroelectric construction camp. Dermod Flynn, the central character of Children of the Dead End, is Patrick MacGill, or at least is as much of Patrick MacGill as MacGill wanted his readers to know. MacGill had escaped from the common lodging house and the navvy’s bivouac by his self-taught skill as a writer when his sketches from the construction camp and reviews of his first collection of poetry had found him a post as a writer on the Daily Express.

Earlier, in that last summer of peace, he had returned to Glasgow from his new, and perhaps somewhat improbable, position at the heart of the Anglican Establishment as secretary and librarian at St George’s Chapel, Windsor (he was after all a scantily educated Irish Catholic), to research the background for what would be his second and equally successful and sensational novel, The Rat-Pit. This is the harrowing account of the life and death of Dermod’s youthful love, Norah Ryan, in the lodging-houses and slum tenements of Glasgow. MacGill’s work in the cloisters of Windsor, helping Canon John Dalton, the Steward of St George’s Chapel and a domestic chaplain to the King, translate Latin manuscripts seems light years away from the grim bleakness of Norah Flynn’s existence and the experiences that Dermod Flynn/Patrick MacGill had shared with her.

On 11 September 1914 MacGill volunteered for military service at Chelsea Barracks London. He was, as he wrote himself, one who had:

… no special yearning towards military life, but who joined the army after war was declared.

Like many Irishmen of the day MacGill saw no difficulty in enlisting in the army of what some of his countrymen saw as an occupying, colonial power. Lord Esher, the President of the County of London Territorial Association, writing in the foreword to another of MacGill’s wartime novels, said:

You had much to give us. The rare experiences of your boyhood, your talents, your brilliant hopes for the future. Upon all these the Western hills and loughs of your native Donegal seemed to have a prior claim. But you gave them to London and our London Territorials. It was an example and a symbol.

As a healthy young man of twenty-four years and six months, hardened by years of physical work in Scotland and standing five foot ten and a half inches tall and with a 41-inch chest, he was readily accepted for service in the 2nd Battalion of the London Irish. Rifleman MacGill, Regimental Number 3008, was sent for basic training to the White City Stadium and then to St Albans. After training he was posted to the 1st Battalion of the same regiment and crossed to France to serve on the Western Front, where, he boasted, he and the Colonel were the only two real Irishmen in the Battalion – a somewhat hyperbolic statement, to judge from the number of Irish names that MacGill introduces into his novel.

Just as MacGill had put his navvying experience to good use in his first novel, so he was to use his army service to create a series of successful autobiographical novels which catered for the public demand for personal accounts of the war. The first of these was The Amateur Army, published in 1915, which gave his personal account of how a young civilian was transformed by basic training into a ‘finished fighter’. Perhaps somewhat naive in its style and tone, The Amateur Army had its origins in a series of articles MacGill wrote during his early months of service and it is naturally untempered by the realities of warfare. The novel was well-received, the Daily Telegraph noting that it gave:

… many vivid pictures of the incidents and humours attending the transformation of a citizen into a soldier.

There are certainly very obvious differences between The Amateur Army and his later war novels. What however they do share is MacGill’s vivid descriptive power.

MacGill had clearly shared in the wave of patriotic zeal which led so many young men of every class and condition to rush to join up in time to take part in a war which was, in the popular view, going to ‘be over by Christmas’. The Amateur Army (and the title is irresistibly British and very much of the period) was described by MacGill as:

… the most democratic army in history; where Oxford undergraduate and farm labourer, cockney and peer’s son lost their identity and their caste in a vast war machine. I learned that Tommy Atkins, no matter from what class he was recruited, is immortal.

A year’s service experience, however, led him, perhaps more realistically, to reflect in The Red Horizon, that:

… the public school clique and the board school clique live each in a separate world, and the line of demarcation between them is sharply drawn.

Both The Red Horizon and The Great Push give an unvarnished, private soldier’s account of war at the sharp end, of the confusion and horrors of war, and of the forces that enable ordinary men to perform extraordinary deeds. Just as in his earlier novels MacGill had written with the insight and actuality which comes from hard-earned living experience rather than from library research, so, in these wartime novels, he puts the 256 days he spent on active service in France to good effect. We get a graphic, insider’s, description of the realities of trench warfare and its impact on both the soldier and on the marvellously resilient, but often forgotten, French civilian population around whose homes, farms and factories the horrors of total war raged. MacGill writes in The Great Push:

… at Cuinchy I saw an ancient woman selling café-au-lait at four sous a cup in the jumble of bricks which was once her home. When the cow which supplied the milk was shot in the stomach the woman still persisted in selling coffee, café noir, at three sous a cup.

If heroic and suffering France was, in MacGill’s words:

… the Phoenix that rises resplendent from her ashes; France that will live for ever because she has suffered …

then the ordinary British soldier is equally long-suffering and heroic. In a passage which foreshadows the notion of the British Expeditionary Force as ‘Lions led by Donkeys’, a concept attributed to the German General Max Hoffman, he writes:

We, soldiers, are part of the Army, the British Army, which will be remembered in days to come, not by a figurehead, as the fighters of Waterloo are remembered by Wellington, but as an army mighty in deed, prowess and endurance; an army which outshone its figureheads.

By the period of The Great Push, the days immediately before the Battle of Loos, MacGill has become a stretcher-bearer, still with the London Irish. This changed role, in the front line but excused many of the routine duties of his comrades, clearly gave MacGill time to observe, to think and to write. He tells us in his Introduction that the book was sketched out in the field and even gives the precise times and places where two of the sections were actually written.

This immediacy of experience was surely one of the reasons for the enormous success of MacGill’s wartime novels and for their interest today. Although they are presented as novels, The Amateur Army, The Red Horizon and The Great Push are intensely autobiographical. Patrick MacGill is the central figure; in these novels we do not even have the thin disguise of a ‘Dermod Flynn’ character interposing between experience and the reader. Contemporary critics recognised that here there was something different, something far removed from the flag-waving, jingoistic novels which had naturally proliferated to fill the market. A critic in Punch reflected a common perception:

Nothing so absolutely absorbing and so awful as The Great Push has, in the way of war literature, crossed my path since August, 1914. It penetrates into one’s very vitals, not because it tells of wonderful hairs-breadth escapes or tremendous deeds of valour, but because it emphasises the grimness and unutterable pathos of modern war.

MacGill does actually tell of hairs-breadth escapes and tremendous deeds of valour but the horror and grimness of war is the prevailing message which most readers will take from this book.

MacGill’s first book had been a collection of poetry, Gleanings from a Navvy’s Scrap Book, and the chapters of The Big Push are prefaced with verses from his poetry, which he later collected in Soldier Songs. He carries over into his fiction a poetic pen and a poet’s eye for detail. Describing the scene on a road behind the front line, a road which had been subject to heavy German shelling, he writes of ‘dead Highlanders with their white legs showing wan in the moonlight’ and the image of young recruits who had not been wearing the kilt long enough to have their legs darkened by sun and wind is both vivid and moving.

The differing perspectives of the front-line soldier and the civilian, safe at home, are well captured by MacGill. One of his characters, Pryor, reflects on the German soldiers, that:

We have no particular hatred for the men across the way …

but that at home:

Good Heavens! you should hear the men past military age revile the Hun. If they were here we couldn’t keep them from getting over the top to have a smack at the foe. And the women! If they were out here, they would just simply tear the Germans to pieces.

MacGill and his comrades carry on doing their duty, suffering and dying, but questioning the processes by which ‘a war to end wars’ is fought. MacGill says:

No one likes this job, but we all endure it as means towards an end.

However he also goes on, with more bitterness, to remark:

Did you see the dead and wounded to-day, the men groaning and shrieking, the bombs flung down into cellars, the blood-stained bayonets, the gouging and the gruelling; all those things are means towards creating peace in a disordered world.

It would be hard for a reader of The Great Push to believe in what the English war-poet Wilfred Owen called ‘the old lie’:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori.

There is, in truth, very little that is sweet and proper in the deaths that the men of the London Irish see, share, inflict and suffer. The corpses MacGill sees are:

… crucifixes fashioned from decaying flesh wrapped in khaki.

The body of the dead soldier lying in No Man’s Land is an outcast.

Worms feasted on its entrails, slugs trailed silverily over its face, and lean rats gnawed at its flesh.

The question of which fatherland he was running the risk of dying for does not seem to have been one that very greatly exercised MacGill. The ‘Irish Question’, which had dogged British politics for more than half a century, and which would find violent form in the Dublin Easter Rising of April 1916, never seemed high on either the civilian or the military MacGill’s agenda. His early novels were filled more with a class-based bitterness against exploitative clergy, greedy employers and rack-renting landlords than with any nationalistic fervour. In his first collection of poems he had written:

I sing of them,The underworld, the great oppressed,Befooled of parson, priest and king

and there seems every reason to believe that, as a socialist, he considered the socio-economic relationships of society of more significance to the ordinary man and woman than the niceties of forms of government.

The images of The Great Push are sharp and vivid, as are the insights into what makes men risk their life for abstractions like ‘democracy’, ‘fatherland’ or ‘duty’. The musing of Private Felan who finds himself alone between the lines:

I can’t take a trench by myself. Shall I go back? If I do some may call me a coward. Oh, damn it! I’ll go forward.

has the ring of truth about it, as has the scene, near the end of the book, where MacGill and his comrades, short of rations, at last receive bread only to find that the loaf is red. When he asks how this had come about he is told:

The bloke as was carryin’ it got ’it in the chest. The rations fell all round ’im and ’e fell top of ’em. That’s why the loaf is red. We were very hungry, and hungry men are not fastidious. We made a good meal.

MacGill was gassed in an action on 14 October 1915, an incident which later caused him some health problems and which brought him before a medical board at the end of the war claiming a pension for nervous debility caused by military service and lung problems. A temporary payment was made but no permanent disability was found. This medical board and its associated paperwork has resulted in some basic records of MacGill’s military service surviving in the Public Record Office. The gas incident was evidently not serious enough to take him out of service because MacGill was wounded in the right arm at the battle of Loos on 28 October 1915. This injury was what the soldiers of the day would have described as ‘a Blighty wound’ and he was invalided home.

While on sick leave in London he married, on 27 November, Margaret Gibbons, a romantic novelist and grandniece of Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore.

Press reports of his wedding suggested that, after a honeymoon in Devon, he was going to rejoin his regiment but MacGill never again served overseas. In March 1917 he was transferred to the Middlesex Regiment, and was thereafter posted to the Labour Corps, the Gloucestershire Regiment and various holding units in the London area. He continued to write, with a fourth war novel, The Brown Brethren, following in 1917. This was not in the autobiographical vein of The Red Horizon and The Great Push, although still informed by his personal experiences of the Western Front. He also published Soldiers Songs in 1916 and The Diggers: The Australians in France in 1919. It may well be that the military authorities thought MacGill was of more use to the war effort as a writer than as a stretcher-bearer. In the 1918 and 1919 editions of Who’s Who he is described as being in the Intelligence Department of the War Office. However exact details of his military employment after November 1915 do not survive – the War Office records, including most of the soldiers’ records from the First World War, were destroyed in the London Blitz in September 1940 and only the note of his service medal entitlement and the records of his medical board survive.

MacGill, after the war, continued for some years to be a prolific and successful commercial novelist although he never perhaps quite achieved the acclaim that his first books enjoyed. In Moleskin Joe, published in 1923, he went back, with some success, to the setting of Children of the Dead End. In 1920 he went on an international lecture tour, and in 1930 diversified into the theatre with a play, Suspense, which was staged at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London in April 1930. This drama was based on an incident from the First World War but seems to have been of only limited success. The critic of The Times noted that:

At the end of Mr MacGill’s play there are five minutes so good that all seems grey when compared with them.

but complained of an earlier lack of narrative tension.

Suspense was later filmed and MacGill moved with his wife and three daughters to the United States, probably in the hopes of pursuing a writing career in Hollywood. However this does not seem to have been a successful endeavour and, although he had a bit-part in Noel Coward’s 1932 film Cavalcade, there is no evidence of much success in the United States. It was, of course, the period of the Great Depression and perhaps not the most propitious time to seek a new career. MacGill later moved to Florida and continued to write for a few years – his last novel, Helen Spenser, was published in 1937. Ill health marred his later years and he died in Miami on Saturday 23rd November 1963. His death was not reported in British newspapers such as The Times or The Glasgow Herald – partly because he had been silent as an author for so many years, and doubtless also because the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on 22 November, preoccupied editors at the time.

He is buried in Fall River, Massachusetts, the home of his daughter Patricia.

Brian D. Osborne January 2000

FOREWORD

The justice of the cause which endeavours to achieve its object by the murdering and maiming of mankind is apt to be doubted by a man who has come through a bayonet charge. The dead lying on the fields seem to ask, ‘Why has this been done to us? Why have you done it, brothers? What purpose has it served?’ The battle-line is a secret world, a world of curses. The guilty secrecy of war is shrouded in lies, and shielded by bloodstained swords; to know it you must be one of those who wage it, a party to dark and mysterious orgies of carnage. War is the purge of repleted kingdoms, needing a close place for its operations.

I have tried in this book to give, as far as I am allowed, an account of an attack in which I took part. Practically the whole book was written in the scene of action, and the chapter dealing with our night at Les Brebis, prior to the Big Push, was written in the trench between midnight and dawn of September the 25th; the concluding chapter in the hospital at Versailles two days after I had been wounded at Loos.

PATRICK MACGILL

CHAPTER 1

IN THE ADVANCE TRENCHES

Now when we take the cobbled road

We often took before,

Our thoughts are with the hearty lads

Who tread that way no more.

Oh! boys upon the level fields,

If you could call to mind

The wine of Café Pierre le Blanc

You wouldn’t stay behind.

But when we leave the trench at night,

And stagger ’neath our load,

Grey, silent ghosts as light as air

Come with us down the road.

And when we sit us down to drink

You sit beside us too,

And drink at Café Pierre le Blanc

As once you used to do.

The Company marched from the village of Les Brebis at nightfall; the moon, waning a little at one of its corners, shone brightly amidst the stars in the east, and under it, behind the German lines, a burning mine threw a flame, salmon pink and wreathed in smoke, into the air. Our Company was sadly thinned now, it had cast off many – so many of its men at Cuinchy, Givenchy, and Vermelles. At each of these places there are graves of the London Irish boys who have been killed in action.

We marched through a world of slag heaps and chimney stacks, the moonlight flowing down the sides of the former like mist, the smoke stood up from the latter straight as the chimneys themselves. The whirr of machinery in the mine could be heard, and the creaking wagon wheels on an adjoining railway spoke out in a low, monotonous clank the half strangled message of labour.

Our way lay up a hill; at the top we came into full view of the night of battle, the bursting shells up by Souchez, the flash of rifles by the village of Vermelles, the long white searchlights near Lens, and the star-shells, red, green and electric-white, rioting in a splendid blaze of colour over the decay, death and pity of the firing line. We could hear the dull thud of shells bursting in the fields and the sharp explosion they made amidst the masonry of deserted homes; you feel glad that the homes are deserted, and you hope that if any soldiers are billeted there they are in the safe protection of the cellars.

The road by which we marched was lined with houses all in various stages of collapse, some with merely a few tiles shot out of the roofs, others levelled to the ground. Some of the buildings were still peopled; at one home a woman was putting up the shutters and we could see some children drinking coffee from little tin mugs inside near the door; the garret of the house was blown in, the rafters stuck up over the tiles like long, accusing fingers, charging all who passed by with the mischief which had happened. The cats were crooning love songs on the roofs, and stray dogs slunk from the roadway as we approached. In the villages, with the natives gone and the laughter dead, there are always to be found stray dogs and love-making cats. The cats raise their primordial, instinctive yowl in villages raked with artillery fire, and poor lone dogs often cry at night to the moon, and their plaint is full of longing.

We marched down the reverse slope of the hill in silence. At the end of the road was the village; our firing trench fringed the outer row of houses. Two months before an impudent red chimney stack stood high in air here; but humbled now, it had fallen upon itself, and its own bricks lay still as sandbags at its base, a forgotten ghost with blurred outlines, it brooded, a stricken giant.

The long road down the hill was a tedious, deceptive way; it took a deal of marching to make the village. Bill Teake growled. ‘One would think the place was tied to a string,’ he grumbled, ‘and some one pullin’ it away.’

We were going to dig a sap out from the front trench towards the German lines; we drew our spades and shovels for the work from the Engineers’ store at the rear and made our way into the labyrinth of trenches. Men were at their posts on the fire positions, their balaclava helmets resting on their ears, their bayonets gleaming bright in the moonshine, their hands close to their rifle barrels. Sleepers lay stretched out on the banquette with their overcoats over their heads and bodies. Out on the front the Engineers had already taped out the night’s work; our battalion had to dig some two hundred and fifty yards of trench three feet wide and six feet deep before dawn, and the work had to be performed with all possible dispatch. Rumour spoke of thrilling days ahead; and men spoke of a big push which was shortly to take place. Between the lines there are no slackers; the safety of a man so often depends upon the dexterous handling of his spade; the deeper a man digs, the better is his shelter from bullet and bomb; the spade is the key to safety.

The men set to work eagerly, one picked up the earth with a spade and a mate shovelled the loose stuff out over the meadow. The grass, very long now and tapering tall as the props that held the web of wire entanglements in air, shook gently backwards and forwards as the slight breezes caught it. The night was wonderfully calm and peaceful; it seemed as if heaven and earth held no threat for the men who delved in the alleys of war.

Out ahead lay the German trenches. I could discern their line of sandbags winding over the meadows and losing itself for a moment when it disappeared behind the ruins of a farm-house – a favourite resort of the enemy snipers, until our artillery blew the place to atoms. Silent and full of mystery as it lay there in the moonlight, the place had a strange fascination for me. How interesting it would be to go out there beyond our most advanced outpost and have a peep at the place all by myself. Being a stretcher-bearer there was no necessity for me to dig; my work began when my mates ceased their labours and fell wounded.

Out in front of me lay a line of barbed wire entanglements.

‘Our wire?’ I asked the Engineer.

‘No – the Germans’,’ he answered.

I noticed a path through it, and I took my way to the other side. Behind me I could heard the thud of picks and the sharp, rasping sound of shovels digging into the earth, and now and again the whispered words of command passing from lip to lip. The long grass impeded my movements, tripping me as I walked, and lurking shell-holes caught me twice by the foot and flung me to the ground. Twenty yards out from the wire I noticed in front of me something moving on the ground, wriggling, as I thought, towards the enemy’s line. I threw myself flat and watched. There was no mistaking it now; it was a man, belly flat on the ground, moving off from our lines. Being a non-combatant I had no rifle, no weapon to defend myself with if attacked. I wriggled back a few yards, then got to my feet, re-crossed the line of wires and found a company-sergeant-major speaking to an officer.

‘There’s somebody out there lying on the ground,’ I said. ‘A man moving off towards the German trenches.’

The three of us went off together and approached the figure on the ground, which had hardly changed its position since I last saw it. It was dressed in khaki, the dark barrel of a rifle stretched out in front. I saw stripes on a khaki sleeve …

‘One of a covering-party?’ asked the sergeant-major.

‘That’s right,’ came the answer from the grass, and a white face looked up at us.

‘Quiet?’ asked the S.M.

‘Nothing doing,’ said the voice from the ground. ‘It’s cold lying here, though. We’ve been out for four hours.’

‘I did not think that the covering-party was so far out,’ said the officer, and the two men returned to their company.

I sat in the long grass with the watcher; he was the sergeant in command of the covering party.

‘Are your party out digging?’ he asked.

‘Yes, out behind us,’ I answered. ‘Is the covering-party a large one?’

‘About fifty of us,’ said the sergeant.

‘They’ve all got orders to shoot on sight when they see anything suspicious. Do you hear the Germans at work out there?’

I listened; from the right front came the sound of hammering.

‘They’re putting up barbed wire entanglements and digging a sap,’ said the sergeant. ‘Both sides are working and none are fighting. I must have another smoke,’ said the sergeant.

‘But it’s dangerous to strike a light here,’ I said.

‘Not in this way,’ said the sergeant, drawing a cigarette and a patent flint tinder-lighter from his pocket. Over a hole newly dug in the earth, as if with a bayonet, the sergeant leant, lit the cigarette in its little dug-out, hiding the glow with his hand.

‘Do you smoke?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I smoke,’ and the man gave me a cigarette.

It was so very quiet lying there. The grasses nodded together, whispering to one another. To speak of the grasses whispering during the day is merely a sweet idea; but God! they do whisper at night. The ancients called the winds the Unseen Multitude; the grasses are long, tapering fingers laid on the lips of the winds. ‘Hush!’ the night whispers. ‘Hush!’ breathes the world. The grasses touch your cars, saying sleepily, ‘Hush! be quiet!’

At the end of half an hour I ventured to go nearer the German lines. The sergeant told me to be careful and not to go too close to the enemy’s trenches or working parties. ‘And mind your own covering-party when you’re coming in,’ said the sergeant. ‘They may slip you a bullet or two if you’re unlucky.’

Absurd silvery shadows chased one another up and down the entanglement props. In front, behind the German lines, I could hear sounds of railway wagons being shunted, and the clank of rails being unloaded. The enemy’s transports were busy; they clattered along the roads, and now and again the neighing of horses came to my cars. On my right a working party was out; the clank of hammers filled the air. The Germans were strengthening their wire entanglements; the barbs stuck out, I could see them in front of me, waiting to rip our men if ever we dared to charge. I had a feeling of horror for a moment. Then, having one more look round, I went back, got through the line of outposts, and came up to our working party, which was deep in the earth already. Shovels and picks were rising and falling, and long lines of black clay bulked up on either side of the trench.

I took off my coat, got hold of a mate’s idle shovel, and began to work.

‘That my shovel?’ said Bill Teake.

‘Yes, I’m going to do a little,’ I answered. ‘It would never do much lying on the slope.’

‘I suppose it wouldn’t,’ he answered. ‘Will you keep it goin’ for a spell?’

‘I’ll do a little bit with it,’ I answered. ‘You’ve got to go to the back of the trenches if you’re wanting to smoke.’

‘That’s where I’m goin’,’ Bill replied. ‘ ’Ave yer got any matches?’

I handed him a box and bent to my work. It was quite easy to make headway; the clay was crisp and brittle, and the pick went in easily, making very little sound. M’Crone, one of our section, was working three paces ahead, shattering a square foot of earth at every blow of his instrument.

‘It’s very quiet here,’ he said. ‘I suppose they won’t fire on us, having their own party out. By Jove, I’m sweating at this.’

‘When does the shift come to an end?’ I asked.

‘At dawn,’ came the reply. He rubbed the perspiration from his brow as he spoke. ‘The nights are growing longer,’ he said, ‘and it will soon be winter again. It will be cold then.’

As he spoke we heard the sound of rifle firing out by the German wires. Half a dozen shots were fired, then followed a long moment of silent suspense.

‘There’s something doing,’ said Pryor, leaning on his pick. ‘I wonder what it is.’

Five minutes afterwards a sergeant and two men came in from listening patrol and reported to our officer.

‘We’ve just encountered a strong German patrol between the lines,’ said the sergeant. ‘We exchanged shots with them and then withdrew. We have no casualties, but the Germans have one man out of action, shot through the stomach.’

‘How do you know it went through his stomach?’ asked the officer.