Hours of quiet passed, while the men silently lay in their burrows in the ravine, listening to the cheerful chirp of the crickets, and trying to relax their nerves which had been tautened almost to breaking by the terrific barrage of the early afternoon.
“Je’s, I wish we had some more of that salmon, Pugh. We were crazy to give it all away.”
“No, we wasn’t. These mamma’s boys’d starve to death if somebody didn’t pr’vide for ’em.”
While they were talking, Sergeant Harriman, stealing along the ravine, came to their burrow: “Here’s some Argentina beef that you fellows can have some of. I got three cans of it.”
It was a little blue can, and when Pugh lifted a piece of it to his mouth he shuddered. “Smells like some’p’n you’ve stepped in. Mah guts can’t go that stuff.”
“Yes, they can,” Harriman encouraged. “It’s not half bad if you don’t breathe while you’re chewing it. I’ve been eating it all day.”
Pugh, holding his nostrils together, gulped down a handful of the evil-smelling food. “That’s not so bad, Hicksy. Try some of it.”
He passed over the can to Hicks.
In the early morning the German lines were represented by a black strip of woods, some five hundred yards in the distance, that looked a narrow piece of jet-black lace through the gray dawn. To the men on watch it was inconceivable that such a calm, almost sketched scene existed so near to them. The brain-piercing explosions of the shells still remembered, the calmness of the surroundings was unreal. Quiet belonged to another world.
Day broke fully. From above, the hot sun beat cruelly upon the earth. The helmets of the men were like hot frying-pans. Sweat soaked through the padding in the helmets and ran down the men’s faces in tiny, dirty rivulets. Their skin, beneath their woollen shirts and breeches, itched unbearably. At the knees, where the breeches tightly fitted, the shell powder had soaked through and was biting the flesh.