Now the moon slid again behind the racing clouds, and patches of light and shadow in turn chased across the open ground.

“Here they come,” said the captain of B Company a few minutes later.  “At least I think it’s them, altho’ I can only see two men and no stretcher.”

“Do you see them?” said an eager voice in French at his ear, and when he turned and found the gunner captain and explained to him, the captain made a gesture of despair.  “Perhaps it is that they cannot move him,” he said.  “Or would they, do you think, return for more help?  I should go myself but that I may be needed to talk with the battery.  Perhaps one of my signalers——­”

But the Englishman assured him it was better to wait; they could not be returning for help; that the three could do all a dozen could.

Again they waited and watched in eager suspense, glimpsing the crawling figures now and then, losing them again, in doubts and certainty in swift turns as to the whereabouts and identity of the crawling figures.

“There is one of them,” said the captain quickly; “there, by himself, in those cursed red breeches.  They show up in the flarelight like a blood-spot on a clean collar.  Dashed idiot!  And I was a fool, too, to let him go like that.”

But it was plain now that ’Enery Irving was dragging his red breeches well clear of the others, although it was not plain, what the others had done with the stretcher.  There were two of them at the length of a stretcher apart, and yet no visible stretcher lay between them.  It was the sergeant who solved the mystery.

“I’m blowed!” he said, in admiring wonder; “they’ve covered the stretcher over with cut grass.  They’ve got their man too—­see his head this end.”

Now that they knew it, all could see the outline of the man’s body covered over with grass, the thick tufts waving upright from his hands and nodding between his legs.

They were three-quarters of the way across now, but still with a dangerous slope to cross.  It was ever so slight, but, tilted as it was towards the enemy’s line, it was enough to show much more plainly anything that moved or lay upon its face.  They crawled on with a slowness that was an agony to watch, crawled an inch at a time, lying dead and still when a light flared, hitching themselves and the dragging stretcher onwards as the dullness of hazed moonlight fell.

The French captain was consumed with impatience, muttering exhortations to caution, whispering excited urgings to move, as if his lips were at the creepers’ ears, his fingers twitching and jerking, his body hitching and holding still, exactly as if he too crawled out there and dragged at the stretcher.

And then when it seemed that the worst was over, when there was no more than a score of feet to cover to the barbed wire, when they were actually crawling over the brow of the gentle rise, discovery came.  There were quick shots from one spot of the German parapet, confused shouting, the upward soaring of half a dozen blazing flares.