"I'll take the machine-gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it," said J———. For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no telling what risks youth might take with machine-guns.
We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a soldier on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international copyright in strategy is recognized. We rushed out of the mess hall into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, rifles laid on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.
"Who are you? Answer, or we fire!" called the ranking young lieutenant.
If any persons present out in front in the face of thirty rifles knew the English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation, they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks. The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.
"Enough! Cease fire!" said the officer. "Nobody there. If there had been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover."
This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a fusillade in this kind of a test.
After dinner J———rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again, for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine-gun expedition. J———'s knees were black and blue in spots; they were also—well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of turning a machine-gun on them before they turn one on you!
"One man hit by a stray bullet," said J———on his return.
"I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg," said the other officer.
"Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got about the only shot fired at us."