Shoulder to shoulder Dennis and Dan crept forward across that No Man's Land, the wind rustling in the tangled grass, bringing with it the acrid odour of unburied corpses. Dan's hand encountered one of them, and he nudged his cousin to work away more to the right.
This brought them to the edge of the first crump-hole, and glancing every few yards at the luminous dial, they kept on for some distance unchecked.
"We ought to be on it now," murmured Dennis. "It's a quarter of an hour since we left the listening post." And he felt cautiously to the full extent of his arms, but without encountering an upright standard.
They did not know it, but they had passed through a gap!
"Hold on!" whispered the Australian; "I thought I heard something quite close on the left there."
Dennis heard it, too, at the same moment. It was like the solemn rattle of earth falling into a newly made grave.
"It's only the chalk settling in those other crump-holes Baker warned us about," he said, after they had listened breathlessly for a few moments. "Our two fellows must have gone wide and struck them."
But he was wrong. The crump-holes were on the left, far behind, if they had only known it; and it was from their right rear that a sudden muffled exclamation came out of the stillness.
"'Evins!" said Tiddler, as he felt the sharp barbs of a low-stretched strand bury themselves in the slack of his pants. "'Arry, I'm 'ung up!"
"Shut yer 'ead! What's the trouble?" growled his companion; and as Harry Hawke groped for his mate he shook the strand; the well-known jangle of an empty bully-beef tin warning them all that they had struck one of the simplest expedients of modern warfare, freely used by both sides.