not a living soul to be seen--and
nevertheless watchers everywhere. "Step forward on to that
little plot of grass in front of the cottage windows and
you're a dead man"--the moonlight said. There were men in
the body of the earth, not in trenches, but in holes--my
foot stepped on a head of hair and some low voice cursed me.
I was, I suppose, by this time, a little delirious with my
adventure. I know that I could now distinguish no separate
sounds--shells and bullets had vanished and in their stead
were whispers and screams and shouts of triumph and bursts
of laughter. Songs in chorus, somewhere miners hammering
below the earth, somewhere storm at sea with the crash of
waves on rocks and the shriek of wind through rigging,
somewhere some one who dropped heavy loads of furniture so
carelessly that I cursed him--and always these little
patches of moonlight, so tempting just because one was
forbidden....

We were not popular here. Husky, breathless voices whispered
to us "to be away from here, quick. We would draw the fire.
What did we want here now?"

"Have you any wounded?" we whispered in return.

"No, no," the answer came. "Keep away from the moonlight."
The voices came to us connected sometimes with a nose, an
eye, or a leg, often enough out of the heaven itself.

"There's a man wounded behind the next lines," some voice
murmured.

We stumbled on and suddenly came to a river with very steep
banks and a number of narrow and slender bridges. If this
_had_ in reality been a nightmare this river could not have
obtruded itself more often than it did. We discovered to our
dismay that our soldier-guide had disappeared (exactly as in
a nightmare he would have done). We crossed the river
(bathed of course in moonlight), the plank bridge shaking
and quivering beneath us.

We had then a difficult task. Here a row of cottages beneath
the very edge of the bank and in the cottage shadow the
soldiers were ranged in a long line. Their boots stretched
to the verge of the bank, which was slippery and uncertain.
We had to walk on this with our stretchers, stepping between
the boots, stumbling often and slipping down towards the
water.

"Any wounded?" we whispered again and again.

"No," the whisper came back. "Hasten.