“Look at it!” he said enthusiastically; “look at the view you get!”
The Corporal viewed dispassionately for a moment the dreary expanse below, the shell-churned morass and mud, wandering rivulets and ditches, shell-wrecked fragments of farms and buildings, the broken, bare-stripped poles of trees.
“Bloomin’ great, ain’t it?” he mumbled disgustedly, through his bandaged jaws. “Fair beautiful. Makes you think you’d like to come ’ere after the war an’ build a ’ouse, an’ sit lookin’ out on it always—I don’t think.”
“Exactly what I said the second I saw it,” said the Sergeant, and chuckled happily. “Only my house’d be a nice little trench an’ a neat little dug-out, an’ be for duration o’ war. Think o’ it, man—just think o’ this winter, with us up here along the ridge, an’ Fritz down in his trenches below there, up to the middle in mud. Him cursin’ Creation, and strugglin’ to pump his trenches out; and us sitting nicely up here in the dry, snipin’ down in enfilade along his trench, and pumpin’ the water out of our trenches down on to the flat to drown him out.”
The Sergeant chuckled again, slapped his hands together. “I’ve been havin’ that side of it back in the salient there for best part o’ two years, off and on. Fritz has been up top, keepin’ his feet dry and watchin’ us gettin’ shelled an’ shot up an’ minnie-werfered to glory—squattin’ up here, smokin’ his pipe an’ takin’ a pot-shot at us, and watchin’ us through his field-glasses, just as he felt like. And now it’s our turn. Don’t let me hear anybody talk about drivin’ the Hun back for miles from here. I don’t want him to go back; I want him to sit down there the whole darn winter, freezin’ an’ drownin’ to death ten times a day. Fritz isn’t go in’ to like that—not any. I am, an’ that’s why I hung like grim death to this look-out point. This is where we come in; this is our turn!”
XVI
ACCORDING TO PLAN
“Ratty” Travers dropped his load with a grunt of satisfaction, squatted down on the ground, and tilting his shrapnel helmet back, mopped a streaming brow. As the line in which he had moved dropped to cover, another line rose out of the ground ahead of them and commenced to push forward. Some distance beyond, a wave of kilted Highlanders pressed on at a steady walk up to within about fifty paces of the string of flickering, jumping white patches that marked the edge of the “artillery barrage.”