With Haig on the Somme

by D. H. Parry

Dennis peeped through a crack in the wall and bent over him.

"The attack has been completely successful," he said. "The supports are swarming in now."

"Vive la patrie!" cried the wounded man, whose grey-blue tunic was stained crimson with his own blood. "I thank you from the bottom of my heart, lieutenant. Again you heap the coals of fire upon me."

Then he fainted.

"Come along, Alphonse," said one of the stretcher-bearers to his companion. "We must get him to the surgeon at once."

"And we," said the Alsatian corporal, touching Dennis on the arm. "Shall we return up yonder?"

The commandant's revolver lay among the nettles, Dennis picked it up, and the pair raced side by side again up the trampled slope.

Lithe and active as Dennis was, his new friend, loaded with his pack and hung about with bulging wallets and strings of racket bombs, was over the parapet before him, and the boy's after-recollection of the ten minutes that followed was a chaotic jumble of mad slaughter.

The French infantry were in terrible earnest, and out to kill. They had old scores to wipe off, and at the outset nothing could stay them.

Figures in blue grey and figures in greeny grey wrestled and fought in the drifting smoke, and what with the hideous gas helmets and their huge goggles, and the mediæval-looking trench helmets, Dennis seemed to have suddenly found himself in the company of weird demons from some other world.