Not a sound was to be heard, except the whisper of the poplars and the tramp of the men’s feet upon the pave.  The road was so greasy with mud that it might have been beeswaxed, and Stokes’s boots, the nails of which had been worn down, kept slipping as on a parquet floor.  As they passed through the mean little villages not a light was to be seen; even the estaminets were shut, but now and again a dog barked mournfully at its chain.  Once a whispered command was given at the head of the column, which halted so suddenly that the men behind almost fell upon the men in front, and then backed hastily; and these movements were automatically communicated all down the column, so that the sections of fours lurched like the trucks of a train which is suddenly pulled up.  At that moment something flashed at the head of the column, and Stokes suddenly caught a glimpse of the faces of the captain and the subaltern in an aureole of light lit by the needle-like rays of an electric torch as they studied a map and compass.

But in no long time their ears told them they were nearing their destination, even as a traveller learns that he is nearing the sea.  For they heard the crackle of musketry following upon the altercation of guns.  All this passed as in a dream, and it seemed little more than a few minutes before Sergeant Stokes, having passed through a curtain of shrapnel, had his platoon extended in some shallow support trenches to which the remnants of the regiment whom they were called upon to stiffen had fallen back.  It was a critical moment:  our first trenches were in the hands of the enemy, and the whole line was sagging under the impact of the German hordes.  Somehow that trench had to be recaptured—­to be recaptured before the Germans had converted the parados into an invulnerable parapet and had constructed a nest of machine-guns to sweep with a crossfire the right and left flanks, where our line curved in like a gigantic horse-shoe.  Of all this Sergeant Stokes knew as little as is usually given to one platoon to know on a front of eight miles.

As dawn broke and the stars paled, the word came down the line, and, in a series of short rushes, stooping somewhat in the attitude of a man who is climbing a very steep hill, they moved forward in extended order about eight or ten paces apart carrying their rifles with bayonets fixed.  A hail-storm of lead greeted them, and all around him Sergeant Stokes saw men falling, and as they fell lying in strange attitudes and uncouth—­some stumbling (he had seen a hare shot in the back dragging its legs in just that way), others lying on their faces and clutching the earth convulsively as they drummed with their feet, and some very still.  Overhead there was a sobbing and whimpering in the air.  A little ahead to the left of him a machine-gun was tap-tapping like a telegraph instrument, and as it traversed the field of their advance the men went down in swathes.