They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles.  The grain parted in swaths over them.  Surely the Germans might see the turtles’ heads as they were raised to look around.  No officer can be too young and supple for this kind of work.  Here the company officer just out of school is in his element, with an advantage over older officers.  That pair were used to crawling.  They did not keep their heads up long.  They knew just how far they might expose themselves.  They passed out of sight, and reappeared and slipped back over the parapet again without the Germans being any the wiser.  Hard luck!  It is an unaccommodating world!  They found that the patrol which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern that they were old and must have been there for some time.

“I’ll take the machine-gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it,”
said J------.  For the colonel puts on the brakes.  Otherwise, there is no
telling what risks youth might take with machine-guns.

We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a soldier 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.