Drizzle, light during the afternoon, increased to a moderate downpour as the Normans were digging, not the elaborate sandbagged trenches so very familiar at home (and but little elsewhere), but mere shallow excavations providing just sufficient cover for the body. An interesting operation provided with a little mild excitement in the form of enemy snipers, who, however, greatly assisted in the rapid and hurried completion of the work. (N.B.—This undertaking in training required half a morning!) Stumpy crawled up and down the line for a yard or two in the vague hope that someone might have made a hole too large; nothing doing, he started on one himself, grumbling audibly.
"That's it ... poor Tommy. Making a 'ole," pessimistically, "diggin' a grave for his bloomin' self."
Normans gaze westward where the vague grey earth meets the overcast sky. Five miles deep in less than twelve hours. The thrill of it—and what you have you will HOLD.
With the coming of the night came the reaction. Wild excitement and vim of victorious advance gave way for calm reflection and with it the certain knowledge of counter-attack. They realised abruptly that they were physically and mentally worn, the body clamoured madly for food and drink, the mind for rest and sleep. Rain trickled incessantly down each man's face and glistened in dusty beads upon foreheads, clothing at last gave way to complete saturation, and water, collecting in pools until over ankle deep, oozed slushily in and out of the eyelet holes.
Cold rapidly fastened its grip; dull agony pervaded the entire being until nothing more than a mechanical row of figures staring tiredly out upon No Man's Land, grasping rust-flaked rifles in numb, stiff hands. Thinking not, caring not, moving not—only that uncertain stare into the void. And over all the night, the wild shrieking of lost spirits in the trees, the sharp crack of an occasional rifle or fitful bursts from the poorly-timed enemy shrapnel.
Patrols were sent out into No Man's Land, groped blindly to and fro for two hours and returned in the very last stage of complete exhaustion to report "All Clear." Simple, is it not, to go on patrol from a line you cannot see towards another line you also cannot see ... sometimes you lost touch with the others and gazed round into the blackness with that primordial fear of the unknown inspired by the night. Lost! God, it nearly unmans you. With fast-thumping heart you hear the approach of guttural Hun voices ... DOWN and QUIET. At last calm thinking points out that yon burning house is in your own lines. Make for it and all is well. Aye. Scouts, does the pulse quicken even now?
What is the thin veneer of a mere nine hundred years semi-civilisation? Two thousand years before the Conquest the fierce warrior Northmen lived by the might of the halbert, fighters one and all from the days when the war-inspired mother croned of the battle-axe to her babe. And in the Normans was that Norse spirit dormant; but one night of such hardship as yet undreamt of had sufficed for an awakening.
In the dawn they looked out with nearly bloodshot eyes towards the German front. He would counter-attack, would he? Let him come!
He came! They poured one long volley into the long-coated line. It wavered, broke, thinned. At the junction with the Middlesex an Englishman gazed in unfeigned astonishment at the ugly, set features of his Norman companion.
"But," he said, "they might have wanted to be prisoners."