Since October this wall of his had fronted the other wall and now it was June. For nine long months, through snow and rain and sunshine, from the long nights to the long pitiless days, these two walls had remained the same, sheltering the same lurking enmities though the individuals who temporarily incarnated them came and went. Sometimes ablaze with stabs of darting flame, erupting bombs lobbed with a deceptive innocent slowness through the air, belching a mass of men who ran and stumbled and fell in an infinite variety of ways—men who shouted and who screamed so that their voices pierced the appalling uproar; sometimes stretching blank across the fields in a deathly stillness as to-day; their position had never altered. The quagmire between them, criss-crossed with barbed wire, had grown up into a waste of grass and nodding poppies that nearly hid what looked like bundles of weather-stained old clothes whence came a sickening, all-pervading smell. Behind each wall, hundreds of men had died or been carried away, maimed and broken, a lifelong burden for some human heart. Not a sandbag of those piled to make the parapet which sheltered the subaltern, but might have had a man's name written on it in memoriam of a life suddenly extinguished. The necrology of the opposing parapet would have been as full.
In the hush which brooded over so much death—past and to come—a pause, it would seem, where the overhanging invisible demon of war reflected on its work—a mood of questioning, of revolt, came over the subaltern as he scribbled his pencilled lines.
"On a quiet evening like this one cannot help moralising a little," he wrote, "wondering what it's all for and what we purchase with our death. This constant murdering of individuals on both sides who commit the crime of inadvertently showing an inch of head—how does this help matters?" The sharp crack of a rifle somewhere along the trench caused the officer to raise his head, listening with all his faculties at strain. The look-out at his side did not stir, no report followed the first, and he bent himself again to his letter. "I don't want to appear squeamish, fine-stomached in this rough game, but I don't think I shall ever be able to kill cold-bloodedly. I have been unfitted by long centuries of culture——"
He was interrupted by the appearance of another officer, who squirmed himself round the traverse with a pronounced stoop necessitated by his uncommon tallness. The fair-moustached, boyish face of the new-comer was radiant with glee.
"I say, Lennard!" he said impetuously. "Ripping luck! We've just bagged Fritz! You heard the shot just now? Folwell, my sergeant, got him. Been waiting for him for over an hour, without moving a muscle. Topping chap, Folwell. All he said was, 'Married life don't seem to 'ave spoilt my aim, sir.' You remember, he asked for leave to get married?"
Lennard abandoned his letter and lit a cigarette.
"I wonder whether Fritz was married," he said with a little malicious smile, the ideas recently in possession of him firing a final shot in a faint rearguard action with the returning everyday occupants.
"Well, that's one more nuisance abated."
"Rather!" said the other, seating himself and likewise lighting a cigarette. "Fritz must have bagged not less than a dozen of our chaps," he calculated, gazing reflectively at the thin spiral of tobacco smoke which ascended straight in the still evening air. "Well, he's gone, thank the Lord! and we got Hans yesterday and Karl the day before. I must have a pot at old Hermann. If we could bag him we might hope for a quiet life."
Lennard nodded. Each one of the German snipers—if sufficiently lucky to carry on his profession for a day or two—acquired an individuality and a name. Hermann was an especially dangerous neighbour who lurked somewhere in a ruined cottage that lay between the lines where they bent away slightly from each other. He rarely fired except to kill, and hid himself so well that not one of the numerous patrols sent out had succeeded in discovering his lair.