"Are you hit?" said Dennis, feeling himself turn pale.
"No, I ain't hit, sir, but I'm 'urt. You don't do your jobs 'arf properly, 'Arry!" And he exhibited the piece of barbed wire on which, forgetting all about it, Tiddler had sat down heavily.
Hawke's uproarious laughter as he disengaged the offending thing sounded oddly to Dennis in the midst of that fearful din that shook the ground and brought the chalk rattling down into the hollow, but it was the first time he had been under fire, and he was yet to learn the absolute disregard of danger which the best and worst alike learn in the trenches.
"What's the strength of the attack?" said Dan Dunn to their prisoner, while the two privates went through the pockets of the men he had shot.
"Three battalions of us, and we were told the Brandenburgers were to be brought up in reserve," replied the Saxon. "Look! they are beginning now. That is a smoke shell that has just burst to cover our advance, and the other guns have ceased."
A dense white cloud rolled along the ground in front of the crump-hole, and Hawke and Tiddler instantly faced round, gripping their rifles as they looked up the jagged slope behind them.
"Don't say no this time, sir," said the Cockney private, "or there'll be a rare shermozzle darn 'ere if some of the blighters come on top of us in the dark."
"You can do as you like, Hawke," replied Dennis abstractedly. "But, I say, Dan, I can't stick this any longer. I wonder if our chaps would hear us if we shouted together?"
"Don't shout!" said the Saxon, pulling his sleeve. "See, they are going past now."
Looking up, Dennis made out a bunch of men against the smoke cloud passing on either side of their hole, and his impulse was to scramble up out of it and empty his revolver into their midst.