It was very damp in the wood. The trees were dripping. The tea was cold. The party, with Blain as C.O., and the Adjutant and two subalterns, were a forlorn little group to be left out of a regiment. All had rather a strained air, and my good spirits and feeling of being fresh out from England were evidently not infectious to men who had been through what they had. They had had a shell near them already that morning and were all frankly apprehensive of another. From that moment any ideas I may have had about the pleasures and excitements of active service left me, and I merely wondered what sort of a trench I was going to and what Fate might have to bring me on my first day of active service.
I had always imagined that trenches were only approached by night, and then by crawling on one's belly along narrow communication passages. But we set off in broad daylight, at eight in the morning, to go up to our trench. The reason we were able to do this was because the trenches on the Aisne were along the edges of woods, and it was possible to move through the trees right up to within two hundred yards of the enemy without being observed.
The advanced trench which Goyle was holding with his company lay in a small wood, rather in advance of the main line of trenches. The path which led to it twisted and twined and branched off into other paths so confusedly that I wondered how the Adjutant could find his way. The actual trench itself consisted in a bank along the edge of the wood in which a chain of dug-outs had been excavated. We found Goyle in a dug-out in the centre, which was distinguished from the others by some straw and a couple of water-proof sheets; there was also a wooden box without a lid, in which the officers' rations were kept. Goyle was sitting in the dug-out with Evans, his remaining subaltern, and having taken me thus far, the Adjutant returned to the C.O.
Evans was an old friend of mine and fellow-subaltern. We talked together for a while and then he showed me cautiously how to creep up to the top of the parapet and look through some long grass at the enemy's trenches 200 yards away, and he told me the story of the fight for the position we now held and where so-and-so, and so-and-so—brother officers whom I'd seen leave England a month before with a cheery wave of the hand for me and a joke about meeting "out there" soon—had been killed the day before.
At nine o'clock we rummaged in our ration-box and made breakfast off jam and biscuits and cheese. It was quite pleasant in the dug-out and there was no sound of war. As we were making our breakfast a shot rang out and there was a piercing yell.
"Hullo! they must have got one of the fellows I put on sentry at the edge of the wood," said Goyle, helping himself to more jam.
"Is that one of our fellows?" he called to the sergeant.
"Yessir—hit in the buttocks, sir"; the sergeant slapped the portly part of himself on which he sat.
We all laughed.
The yell gave way to groans—loud, long, and terrible.