With the Lewis Gun—and After!
In the old Elizabethan days, before scene-painting was invented, they used to hang a placard on a black cloth behind the actors with such inscriptions as "This is the seashore," "This is a wood." And such a description would have well passed for the spot through which they now threaded their way.
It had been a wood—a wood of tall, straight trees in full summer leaf, with bramble bushes and pleasant undergrowth before the British batteries had flung their devastating hail into it; but now it resembled an old toothbrush more than anything else, with bristles long and short, and sticking out at every angle.
Hundreds of fallen saplings barred their way. Here and there a beech had been uprooted, and a great shell crater yawned where it had stood, and the scarred trunks and bare poles were stained orange and yellow and vivid metallic green by the explosive agents.
A line of Tennyson occurred to Dennis, as odd things will occur at the oddest of moments.
"'I hate the little hollow behind the dreadful wood,'" he murmured, as he made an enforced circuit round a larger crater than usual; and Hawke, who was just ahead of him, stopped short and shrank back with a shout of "Mind your eye, sir!"
Something had crashed among the stumps in front of them, and a German 60-pound shell burst with a deafening roar.
For an instant everything was obscured by a volume of dense black smoke, and a rain of splinters and broken branches fell about them as the smoke curled away.
"That was a near thing," said Dennis. "Another minute, and there would have been three vacancies in the company."
"I'm not sure there ain't some already, sir," said Hawke in a curious, hushed voice. "What's that yonder?"