With Haig on the Somme

by D. H. Parry

They both looked round, as a slim figure in a thin mackintosh crawled up alongside.

"Hear anything, Hawke?" said Dennis.

"Not so far, sir, but it's bloomin' difficult to 'ear to-night—the rain makes such a patter on the chalk, and it's fillin' up the shell 'oles a fair knock-art."

"Well now, look here," said Dennis impressively, "I'm going to shove along, and I want you both to listen with your eyes. You know the Morse code, and if you see anything straight in front of you, pass the word back to Mr. Wetherby on the parapet behind."

"But you ain't goin' alone, sir! You'll let one of us come wiv yer!"

"I am going alone, Hawke. I marked the lie of the ground before the light went, and it's as easy as walking down Piccadilly. If I can't find out what I want I shall come back; anyhow, look and listen!" And he glided off into the rain and was lost to view long before the slither of his footsteps had died away.

Two hundred yards separated friend and foe; two hundred yards of pulverised No Man's Land, now soaked like a sponge. About midway stretched an unfinished German trench, from which our guns had driven the enemy before they had had time to complete it. It was little more than a wet shallow ditch now, with a line of sandbags on the British side, and when Dennis had crossed it he continued his perilous course on hands and knees.

It was a zigzag course to avoid the thirty or forty shell holes that our guns had made, and as he wormed himself forward the darkness of the night and the strange silence of the enemy batteries on that sector confirmed him more than ever in his conviction that something was in preparation.

The trench he was approaching was of quite unusual strength, with a formidable redoubt making a salient in one place, and as he reached the foot of it he knew that a wall of sandbags nearly fifteen feet high towered above his head.

He had seen that before the light went. Now, in the pitchy darkness of the drenching rain, as he crouched at the foot of the wall he could hear the hoarse murmur of many voices behind it, as it seemed to him.