“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 and to 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, in others 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.”