“Sportsman!” thought Peter; and reversed an order for the first time. They left Blenkinsop at the instrument; made their way, three helmeted figures, across a road dark with slime and rotted leaves, past the waiting infantry into Trônes Wood. The wood still stank of putrefying flesh. Barbed wire looped the trailing undergrowth. Here a shell-axed tree leaned drunkenly against its bullet-pocked neighbour. There, fresh-turned earth betrayed the scavenging pick. Beyond the tree-trunks, day glimmered. Above, black branches trellised gray sky. A ditch full of water led through this place of death.
Ahead of them, something whistled into the undergrowth. They dropped into the ditch; waded along, single file, calf-deep in liquid mud; ducked under a fallen log; waded on again. Another shell whistled into the undergrowth above them. “Whizz-bang,” said Peter laconically.
Now, they were under open sky; making their way along a battered trench towards the support-lines. In front of them and behind them, hidden by humped earth from the enemy, toiled little parties of infantry: bomb-carriers, water-carriers, men with loaded rifles and men with empty stretchers.
The liquid mud deepened to quagmire.
Peter, fighting his way forward, felt the false energy of over-fatigue ebbing from his veins. With every painful pace, his feet rooted themselves deeper. Sodden leather wrenched at his ankles. Heavy water bottle, heavier revolver-holster, dragged at hip and shoulder. Each gasped breath seemed to tear at his heart. His helmet was a shifting torment. Bitter sweat blinded his eyes; dripped from chin to tie. Time and again, only the long iron-shod stick saved him from collapse. . . .
Gradually they neared destination; edged way past crouching men, past the gap where Lindsay had died, to a little eminence above plain-level. Here three mud-lanes met in heaped breastworks. Listless stretcher-bearers and a bundle of S.O.S. rockets marked Battalion-Headquarters—a German dug-out, thirty feet below ground-level, reached by a deep chute of greasy slime.
Peter sank down on one of the bomb boxes which littered the ground; leaned gasping on his stick.
“Feeling tired, sir?” asked Finlayson; and getting no answer, unslung his water-bottle, drew out the cork. “Try a drop of this, sir. It’s cold tea.”
“Thanks, Bombardier—but you’d better keep it for yourself—I’ll be all right in a minute.”
A little strength came back to him; he slipped off his helmet; loosed belt at waist. A dozen times during the half mile from Trônes Wood, Peter had wanted to give in; the last three hundred yards had been just a blurr of continuous effort. “Like rowing,” he thought, “got to put your last ounce into it”; and like a rowed-out oarsman he rested for a little—knowing only blessed relief.