In about an hour's time Kenneth and his comrades were relieved to see their food-carriers returning with steaming pails. These contained a sort of hash mixed with beans and potatoes. The men poured this into their billies, warmed them at the braziers, and acknowledged that their dinner of Irish stew à la Française wasn't half bad. After that food was carried up only at night.
The day passed uneventfully. A rifle-shot was heard now and then; from a distant part of the line came the continual rumble of artillery-fire; once they caught sight of a British aeroplane far away to the north-east, with little patches of white smoke following it, hugging it. There was nothing to do except to keep a continual look-out.
But at dusk the reality of their danger was brought home to them. Cramped with the fatigue of maintaining a bending-posture one of the men got up to stretch himself. "Keep down!" shouted Kennedy, but it was too late. There was a slight whizz; the man fell headlong. Kenneth ran to him, as the crack of the rifle was heard. Nothing could be done. The bullet had pierced the man's brain.
When it was dark Kenneth and Ginger carried their dead comrade through the trenches to the wood, and buried him there among the trees. They returned in silence to their post.
"You'll write to his mother," said Ginger, as they got back. "She'll like to know as how poor Dick has been put away decent."
"Yes, I'll write," said Kenneth. "He felt no pain."
"War's a cursed thing," Ginger broke out. "What call have these Kaisers and people to murder young chaps like Dick, all for their own selfishness?--that's what it comes to. It didn't ought to be, and 'pon my soul, it beats me why us millions of working men don't put a stop to it. We're in it now; I'll do my bit; but seems to me the world would be all the better if they'd just string up a few of the emperors and such, them as thinks war's such a mighty fine thing."
Their first loss threw a cloud upon the spirits of the men. But it did not lessen their resolution. Direct knowledge, slight though it was at present, of the grim realities of war braced their courage. Already they had a comrade's death to avenge. To the more thoughtful of them the dead man represented a blow struck at their country, and they saw more clearly than before that it was their country's service that had called them here.
Their spell in the trenches was to last two days. They were days of inaction, discomfort, tedium. Apart from intermittent sniping the Germans made no movement. The Rutlands kept incessant watch on them, with no relaxation until the fall of night. Even then they were not at ease. Sniping was kept up fitfully through the night, and they learnt that even in the darkness there was peril is rising to stretch their cramped limbs. At dusk on the first day a man was slightly wounded. These sneaking tactics, as they considered them, on the part of an unseen enemy worried and irritated the men. Whenever a shot was heard, they tried to estimate its direction, but their guesses were so contradictory that no definite opinion could be arrived at. On one occasion Kenneth tried to calculate the distance of the marksman by noting the interval that elapsed between the whistling sound of the bullet and the subsequent report of the rifle; but neither his data nor his watch were sufficiently accurate to give him much satisfaction. The one thing that seemed certain was that the night sniping was done somewhere behind the lines.
When the battalion was relieved, and returned to billets for a couple of days' rest, officers and men talked of little but the sniping. They thought that nothing could be more demoralising, having as yet had no experience of heavy gun-fire. The officers discussed the possibility of getting hold of the snipers, and determined to take serious steps to that end on their next turn of duty at the trenches.