Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge, as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol returned it closed the gate again.
"Look out for that wire—just there! Do you see it? We've everything to keep the Boches off our front lawn except 'Keep off the grass!' signs."
It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat's-paw of breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from the German trenches swept the brilliant sputter of red light of a German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in head between the trenches.
"Down flat!" whispered the officer.
It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German army in France except that flare. However, if a guide who knows as much about war as this one says you are to prostrate yourself when you are out between two lines of machine-guns and rifles—between the fighting powers of England and Germany—you take the hint. The flare sank into earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling of sparks in our faces.
"What if we had been seen?"
"They'd have combed the wheat in this part thoroughly, and they might have got us."
"It's hard to believe," I said.
So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing. Always hard to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute, painstaking economy of war.
We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on the job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine. We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and overheard by us.