Even the morning "Stand-to" with that mysterious dread of unknown dangers that it invariably brought gave us nothing worse than an hour of chilly waiting—and later, the smoke of the Germans' cooking fires.
There were none for us. It was as simple as algebra. Smoke attracted undue artillery attention—the Germans had artillery; we had not. They had fires; we had not.
The day rolled by smoothly enough. Except for the fresh graves and a certain number of unburied dead the small-pox appearance of the shell-pitted ground about might have been thought to have been of ancient origin; so filled with water were the shell holes and so large had they grown as a result of the constant sloughing in of their sodden banks.
During all these days the German fire on the salient at large had continued as fiercely as before but had spared us its severest trials.
The night of the seventh passed to all outward appearance pretty much in the same manner as the preceding one.