on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in
the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no
one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal
vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its
brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side
succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international
copyright in strategy is recognized. We rushed out of the mess hall
into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, rifles laid
on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.

"Who are you? Answer, or we fire!" called the ranking young
lieutenant.

If any persons present out in front in the face of thirty rifles knew the
English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation,
they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an
unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through
the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks.
The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.

"Enough! Cease fire!" said the officer. "Nobody there. If there had
been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the
wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover."

This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a
fusillade in this kind of a test.

After dinner J------rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again,
for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine-gun
expedition. J------'s knees were black and blue in spots; they were
also--well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the
trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in
the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of
turning a machine-gun on them before they turn one on you!

"One man hit by a stray bullet," said J------on his return.

"I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg,"
said the other officer.

"Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first
time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got
about the only shot fired at us."

"Need a stretcher?"

"No."

Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication
trench, seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is
not a bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.

Night is alway