Then some “Very” lights went up and I saw the Boche parapet not twenty feet away.  Worst of all there was a little lane through their wire at that point, and there would be, no doubt, a sap head or a listening post near.  I tried to lie still and burrow into the dirt at the same time.  Nothing happened.  Presently the lights died, and Bellinger gave me a poke in the ribs.  We started to crawfish.  Why we weren’t seen I don’t know, but we had gone all of one hundred feet before they spotted us.  Fortunately we were on the edge of a shallow shell hole when the sentry caught our movements and Fritz cut loose with the “typewriters.”  We rolled in.  A perfect torrent of bullets ripped up the dirt and cascaded us with gravel and mud.  The noise of the bullets “crackling” a yard above us was deafening.

The fusillade stopped after a bit.  I was all for getting out and away immediately.  Bellinger wanted to wait a while.  We argued for as much as five minutes, I should think, and then the lights having gone out, I took matters in my own hands and we went away from there.  Another piece of luck!

We weren’t more than a minute on our way when a pair of bombs went off about over the shell hole.  Evidently some bold Heinie had chucked them over to make sure of the job in case the machines hadn’t.  It was a close pinch—­two close pinches.  I was in places afterwards where there was more action and more danger, but, looking back, I don’t think I was ever sicker or scareder.  I would have been easy meat if they had rushed us.

We made our way back slowly, and eventually caught the gleam of steel helmets.  They were British.  We had stumbled upon our left sector.  We found out then that the line curved and that instead of the left sector being directly to the left of ours—­the center—­it was to the left and to the rear.  Also there was a telephone wire running from one to the other.  We reported and made our way back to the center in about five minutes by feeling along the wire.  That was our method afterwards, and the patrol was cushy for us.

CHAPTER VII

FASCINATION OF PATROL WORK

I want to say a word right here about patrol work in general, because for some reason it fascinated me and was my favorite game.

If you should be fortunate—­or unfortunate enough, as the case might be—­to be squatting in a front-line trench this fine morning and looking through a periscope, you wouldn’t see much.  Just over the top, not more than twenty feet away, would be your barbed-wire entanglements, a thick network of wire stretched on iron posts nearly waist high, and perhaps twelve or fifteen feet across.  Then there would be an intervening stretch of from fifty to one hundred fifty yards of No Man’s Land, a tortured, torn expanse of muddy soil, pitted with shell craters, and, over beyond, the German wire and his parapet.