It did not seem very likely, on the forward side of a ridge sloping towards Hunland, but unusual things were done in those days of disorganisation and I had not seen a single infantryman since we left the working-parties behind us early in the morning. Our infantry, if they were not a myth, must be east of me, not west.
I left my signallers still flashing vainly and took my orderly with me to the forward slope of the ridge. We stalked down a hedge about 50 yards, then turned due right along another. There was another “pill-box” just half right of us.
“That might be them, sir,” said my orderly.
We swung sharp right and walked up to it. I saw an unusual helmet. “One of our Tommies decking himself out,” I thought. Then another helmet of the same sort, and the truth flashed on me just as it was too late and we were within a few paces of them, with the pill-box between us and home, covered by a couple of German rifles.
A dozen very vivid thoughts raced through my mind. “Somebody’s made the most awful howler.” “I can’t get back.” “Where in thunder were our infantry, then?” “This is the end.” “I haven’t even got a revolver on me.” “Prisoner!—what will they say?” “What the devil will they say?”
I gave the lad an order and we held up our hands. I will not labour the apology. The back verandah of the pill-box—so it looked—was bristling with amazed and animated Huns. Cut off from retreat, unarmed and utterly flabbergasted, what would you? I stammered out a few words in bad French to their officer and then asked leave to sit down. I was exhausted and quite overwhelmed. So this was the result of my fourteen months of cumulative experience. What a culmination! To walk over No Man’s Land on a bye-day in broad daylight into a German nest! Such a thing had never come into our ken that I could remember. And if it had, I should have been the first to pass uncharitable comment. What hideous irony! I looked at the boy I had led unwittingly into captivity. What sort of an officer did he think I was now? He would bless me before it was all over, if all one heard, had read of, was true. Suddenly one began to see the prisoner-of-war question in a new light. What was it like really? And all the time I racked and racked my brains to think whose fault it was, where the mistake had lain. I knew the range on the map to “The Rectory,” which I had just left, and the range of our S.O.S. barrage. Three hundred yards to play with. I had come barely a hundred. Perhaps they hadn’t known of this pill-box. To know, O Lord, if only to know—and I couldn’t[[1]].
[1]. I did learn later, at Stralsund Camp in Germany, where I met the Colonel I was then trying to find. He told me his H.Q. on that day had been 100 yards north of “The Rectory,” which they had found too hot to stay in.
That day seemed an eternity. In the evening I heard the shells from my own battery come whizzing over. I was to have observed them, five rounds of battery fire on the German front line at 5 p.m. Since the push this had been the only method, except by visual; no wires had lived a day up till then.