The searcher in the ditch soon got tired, for the place was very wet, and joined his comrades on the road. They came along, running, flashing the lanterns into the trench, and exploring all the immediate countryside.
Then rose a noise of wheels and horses from the opposite direction. Michael and the delayed wagons were approaching. They dashed up at a great pace, driven wildly, and for one horrid second Peter thought they were going to spill into the ditch at the very spot where he was concealed. The wheels passed so close to the edge that they almost grazed his fingers. Somebody shouted an order and they pulled up a yard or two nearer the bridge. The others came up and there was a consultation.
Michael swore he had passed no one on the road.
“That fool Hannus has seen a ghost,” said the officer testily. “It’s too cold for this child’s play.”
Hannus, almost in tears, repeated his tale. “The man spoke to me in good German,” he cried.
“Ghost or no ghost he is safe enough up the road,” said the officer. “Kind God, that was a big one!” He stopped and stared at a shell-burst, for the bombardment from the east was growing fiercer.
They stood discussing the fire for a minute and presently moved off. Peter gave them two minutes’ law and then clambered back to the highway and set off along it at a run. The noise of the shelling and the wind, together with the thick darkness, made it safe to hurry.
He left the road at the first chance and took to the broken country. The ground was now rising towards a spur of the Palantuken, on the far slope of which were the Turkish trenches. The night had begun by being pretty nearly as black as pitch; even the smoke from the shell explosions, which is often visible in darkness, could not be seen. But as the wind blew the snow-clouds athwart the sky patches of stars came out. Peter had a compass, but he didn’t need to use it, for he had a kind of “feel” for landscape, a special sense which is born in savages and can only be acquired after long experience by the white man. I believe he could smell where the north lay. He had settled roughly which part of the line he would try, merely because of its nearness to the enemy. But he might see reason to vary this, and as he moved he began to think that the safest place was where the shelling was hottest. He didn’t like the notion, but it sounded sense.
Suddenly he began to puzzle over queer things in the ground, and, as he had never seen big guns before, it took him a moment to fix them. Presently one went off at his elbow with a roar like the Last Day. These were Austrian howitzers—nothing over eight-inch, I fancy, but to Peter they looked like leviathans. Here, too, he saw for the first time a big and quite recent shell-hole, for the Russian guns were searching out the position. He was so interested in it all that he poked his nose where he shouldn’t have been, and dropped plump into the pit behind a gun-emplacement.
Gunners all the world over are the same—shy people, who hide themselves in holes and hibernate and mortally dislike being detected.