"Awake, Ginger?" Hugh prodded me with his foot. "You'd better get something inside you, and then we'll go round and see that everything is O.K."
"Have you had any sleep, Hugh?"
"No. I've been reading." He put Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird" on the table. With his finger on the title he looked at me musingly, "Shall we find it to-day, I wonder?"
I have lingered perhaps a little long on what is after all only the introduction to my story. But it is mainly for the sake of Hugh's wife that I have written it at all; to show her how he passed the last few hours before—the change came. Of what happened just after 6.35 on that morning I cannot profess to have any very clear idea. We went over the parapet I remember, and forward at the double. For half an hour beforehand a rain of our shells had plastered the German trenches in front of us, and during those eternal thirty minutes we waited tense. Hugh Latimer alone of all the men I saw seemed absolutely unconscious of anything unusual. Some of the men were singing below their breath, and one I remember sucked his teeth with maddening persistency. And one and all watched me curiously, speculatively—or so it seemed to me. Then we were off, and of crossing No-Man's-Land I have no recollection. I remember a man beside me falling with a crash and nearly tripping me up—and then, at last, the Huns. I let drive with my revolver from the range of a few inches into the fat, bloated face of a frightened-looking man in dirty grey, and as he crashed down I remember shouting, "There's the Blue Bird for you, old dear." Little things like that do stick. But everything else is just a blurred phantasmagoria in my mind. And after a while it was over. The trench was full of still grey figures, with here and there a khaki one beside them. A sapper officer forced his way through shouting for a working-party. We were the flanking company, and vital work had to be done and quick. Barricades rigged up, communication trenches which now ran to our Front blocked up, the trench made to fire the other way. For we knew there would be a counter-attack, and if you fail to consolidate what you've won you won't keep it long. It was while I slaved and sweated with the men shifting sandbags—turning the parados, or back of the trench into the new parapet, or front—that I got word that Hugh was dead. I hadn't seen him since the morning, and the rumour passed along from man to man.
"The Captain's took it. Copped it in the head. Bomb took him in the napper."
But there was no time to stop and enquire, and with my heart sick within me I worked on. One thing at any rate; it had only been a little show, but it had been successful—the dear chap hadn't lost his life in a failure. Then I saw the doctor for a moment.
"No, he's not dead," he said, "but—he's mighty near it. You know he practically ran the show single-handed on the left flank."
"What did he do?" I cried.
"Do? Why he kept a Hun bombing-party who were working up the trench at bay for half an hour by himself, which completely saved the situation, and then went out into the open, when he was relieved, and pulled in seven men who'd been caught by a machine-gun. It was while he was getting the last one that a bomb exploded almost on his head. Why he wasn't killed on the spot, I simply can't conceive." And the doctor was gone.