On our way back we all took different routes back to the company. The idea, of course, was to get a knowledge of all the best roads to take when things were hot. Each man mapped out a rough sketch of the road he had taken for the benefit of the others. My road took me for about a quarter of a mile down the cobbled road, where I turned off for the major's headquarters. I parted from another of the runners here, his route taking him through the village. Incidentally, this coolest of all cool fishes, stopped amongst the shattered houses to see, as he afterwards phrased it, "If there was anything there that nobody had any use for."
I might say the Germans were always busy with their guns on the devastated place, but the incident only goes to show the very peculiar fatalism, that every soldier unconsciously acquires. If he was to be killed in that village, he would get it; that is all there was to it, so he calmly searched the brick piles. The horribly mangled trunk of a tall soldier did not make me any too happy when I stumbled over it directly after leaving my partner. Still I carefully mapped out my route, and meeting another clan runner, we walked the rest of the trip to the major's quarters together.
"Hi mates," said a voice apparently from the bowels of the earth, "come and 'ave a drink o' tea."
The voice came from a field kitchen cunningly hidden in a bank of the road.
"You bet," was our reply together.
The owner of the voice, a short sturdy Cockney, filled a dixie and handed it to me.
I took a long drink, then handed the canteen to my chum.
"I think I'll stretch me legs," said our host.
Forthwith he stepped from his shelter into the road. He had barely taken a dozen steps, when a small shell landed quite a distance in front of him. About a second after the explosion, with a cry, the man threw himself flat on his face and lay still. Both of us knew that the shell had landed too far up the road to be very dangerous to him. We ran to our host, turned him over, only to find that he was stone dead.
"Well I'm jiggered," said my runner chum.