"Not the foggiest, I imagine you mean, sir."
"Umph!" he grunted.
He rather liked my polished wit.
It really was the most extraordinary sensation you can imagine, to go lumbering along at this snail's pace, and to hear those fellows just ahead booing and yelling, and to hear them running towards us, shouting something rude and unladylike and running away, without ever seeing a soul.
We ran up against a bank shortly afterwards, and stayed there for the remainder of the night, the fog sometimes clearing away slightly, but always shutting down, like a blanket, directly we thought of moving on. We found a little gap in the bank for the Maxim, and formed more or less of a hollow square all round it, with my chaps lining the bank.
We let rip a few rounds from it whenever we thought we could hear a lot of those fellows close together, and thought we managed to wing one or two. We certainly found two dead pigs in a sty alongside a hut, about fifty yards away, when the fog did clear away next morning. Ask Whitmore about his Maxim gun and the two pigs; but see that you've got a clear start first!
We made ourselves as cosy as we could—from a "drill book" point of view, I mean—and had to be on the alert all night.
The Skipper and Whitmore paced up and down behind the Maxim gun, the Skipper smoking cigar after cigar, and worrying a good deal about not being able to get on. Old "Blucher" came across to me presently, to where I was sitting on the trail of the Maxim gun, eating some sandwiches which Grainger had brought for me, and telling yarns to young Rawlings and Ponsonby to pass away the time. He sat down between my knees and finished off the gristly parts of the beef inside the sandwiches, and wanted his ears played with. He wasn't at all happy, and the noises all round us and the yelping of dogs had got on his nerves.
I had thrown out half a dozen marines as sentries—only ten yards in front of our bank—and one or other of them kept on letting off their rifles and scooting back. I had to lead them out again, firmly but gently. It's bad enough on an ordinary dark night to have to do sentry business, but in this fog, when you couldn't see anyone till he touched you, it was only the steadiest old soldier who could "stick" it. I was at last compelled to keep walking from one to another myself, and spent most of the night doing this.
There were one or two, what you might call, "incidents".