Now all the men had returned their respirators to the boxes which were fastened by a cord around their necks to their breasts. The sergeant of the Intelligence section set out to find the path in the barbed wire, but there was none where he looked. He turned back, the men following after him like lost sheep, and after sneaking along the wire for some minutes, stopped.
“Hey, you over there in the trench. Pass the word along that the raiding party’s coming in,” the sergeant of the Intelligence section called toward the trench.
One of the sentries in the firing bay heard him, obeyed, and the raiding party dashed through the wire and spilled into the trench. The company commander, a former professor of English at a Texas college, emerged from a near-by dugout and warmly wrung the hand of the lieutenant from the Intelligence section.
“My God, I thought you boys were surely to be killed! You see, I—I must have forgotten that the raiding party was still out, and when I heard that machine-gun firing I thought the Germans were making an attack, so I signalled for a barrage.”
“But you sent up the gas signal instead of the barrage signal,” Bedford interposed.
“Yes, that was just it. I thought that I was firing a red rocket and instead I was firing a green one.” He broke off quickly. “But you got in all right?”
“All right but for one man,” said Bedford.
“And where is he?” the captain asked.
“He—he’s dead,” Hicks told the assembly.