"I told you that I got a supplementary lot of hand grenades by blackmailing the Colonel. Well, it has occurred to me that I might try the same trick for obtaining my commission. Where protection, ability, and courage have failed, blackmailing might succeed."
"Yes," I answer somewhat doubtfully, "but how will you blackmail him?"
"That," he declares solemnly, "is of course a secret between him and me!"
Mr. Reader will understand me, if I state that I grew curious.
"Is there a woman at the bottom of it?"
You ought to have heard the Sergeant's fit of laughter. He does not laugh very often, our Charlie, but when he does, it is the noisiest laugh in the world. Develish we call it. It is indeed a terrific laughter, long and irresistible. Finally, however, he will be able to utter some words. This time he says:
"No! Dear me, no! There wasn't a woman at the bottom of it—no! There was something quite different!"
At this moment the order comes, the order which we had been waiting for during an hour. In single file we march through the communication trenches.
Now, if you think, impatient reader, that I will annoy you with a detailed description of the attack, you are greatly mistaken. Firstly, you have doubtless read many such descriptions in the papers and do not want another. Secondly, I could not depict the attack, because I had another business than that of observing, Lance-Corporals not being, generally, Special Correspondents. Finally, you have no idea how easily one forgets the details. They are rapidly dimmed in the fog of war.
Yet I remember the Germans coming very near us and being beaten back. And I remember, too, the following incidents: