"Quite so!" agreed Wagstaffe, and Kemp chuckled.
"Well, we were standing by the barbed wire entanglement, arguing the point, when suddenly some infernal imbecile in our own trenches—"
"Cockerell, for a dollar!" murmurs Wagstaffe. "Don't say he fired at you!"
"No, he did worse. He let off a fireball."
"Whew! And there you stood in the limelight!"
"Exactly."
"What did you do?"
"I had sufficient presence of mind to do what Carfrae did. I threw myself on my face, and shouted to the two men to do the same."
"Did they?"
"No. They started to run back towards the trenches. Half a dozen
German rifles opened on them at once."