ed on our left a little
group of figures, faintly seen in the mist, attending to some job in the
open. We came in sight of the trench we were making for, and they hailed
us asking the way. We told them, and they came slowly across the open
towards us. They were standing above the trench intent on some business
which needed care when the expected shell whizzed over the hill and
burst. I ducked.

The men, standing on the brink above the trench there, did not even turn
a head to look at it. Five or six angry pieces hissed by, but they no
more heeded them than if it were a schoolboy pelting mud. They were
intent on their business and nothing else. They did not ask for a trench
to get into, but only to be shown the way. Their burden was carried
easier over the open. They were stretcher-bearers.

We started home a good deal later from another part of the line by a
short cut. Five minutes after we had set out, the Germans happened to
turn their barrage across a patch whither our aged trench seemed certain
to lead. There may not have been more than fifteen shells in the minute,
but it seemed, looking along that path, more like thirty. They were of
all sorts mixed--ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the
crash of a big shell; little, spiteful whizzbang field gun tearing into
the brown earth; 5.9 shells flinging up fountains of it. We pushed on
until the shelter petered out and the shorter shells were already
bursting behind us, and the trench was little more than a crater to nip
into when you heard them singing towards you--and then we decided to
give it up. At one time, as we dodged back, a visitor came singing so
straight that we dived headlong into a crater just as you would dive
into the sea.

A few minutes later we were back in the comfort of a fair trench,
perfectly snug, watching the storm. As we reached that trench and turned
into it, two men were clambering up on to the bank to join a party of
five others who were standing up there already, in the open. They were
stooping down to arrange with others the lifting of something up to
them.

They were stretcher-bearers--Australian stretcher-bearers. The two pair
on the bank already had their load, and the others were lifting theirs
up thither. They were just setting out to carry their burden overland on
a track which led straight to the barrage which had turned us back.

I learned more about Australian stretcher-bearers that morning than I
had known sinc