"A corporal and five men," said the sergeant laconically. "And a splinter has broken the Herr Captain's glasses. Oh, he is in a rare fury!"
Another shell burst farther away behind the dug-out, and Dennis wondered whether the French gunners were lengthening their fuses preparatory to the counter-attack.
Mist still hung about the ground, and the moon gave it a very ghostly effect.
Peeping through the door from the dark dug-out—for a rat had suddenly pounced upon the lighted candle and made off with it—he saw the look-out motionless and alert behind the sandbagged parapet, and, sitting on the fire-step, the men of No. 6 Company huddled up. Some of them were asleep with their heads on their comrades' shoulders. The man who had been five times wounded bent forward, grasping one wrist with the other hand, and staring into vacancy; perhaps he was thinking of his dead wife!
Without warning a terrific fire suddenly opened on the village; and Dennis, used as he was to the British bombardment, sat dazed in his cubby-hole as shell after shell burst in such quick succession that the explosions seemed like the continuous fire of some giant machine-gun. He put his hands to his ears and crouched there, bowed, like one awaiting inevitable doom, wondering how it fared with the company outside in the trench and with the rest of the battalion.
For a quarter of an hour the inferno continued, and then ceased as suddenly as it had begun; and in the lull that followed he rose to his feet, knowing that the dug-out would not be a safe place in which to await the counter-attack which would come on the heels of that terrible devastation.
In the doorway he stumbled over something soft, and recognised the upturned face of the good-natured sergeant! The lower part of him from the waist downwards had been blown away; and, stooping down, Dennis gently disengaged the Iron Cross from the breast of his tunic.
"Poor chap!" he muttered. "This will be something for dear little Billy." And then he looked round.
The trench existed no longer as a trench, and terrified, trembling men crawled from among the tumbled sandbags, and out of nooks and corners where they had lain.
The barbed wire looked like a parrot's cage that had been run over by a motor-car, and everyone saw that the position was untenable.