The bombardment, which had been turned on as though somebody held the key to the thunderstorm, and which had crashed and flashed into the hill-side nearly all the night, had gradually died down.  The artillery Staff officers on both sides had long since read the last pink signal form, and had given instructions to cover any possible trouble, and had turned into bed.  The normal early morning gun was sending its normal shell at intervals ranging up the long valley—­rattle, rattle, rattle, until the echo died away up the slopes, like that of a vanishing railway train, or the long-drawn bark of a dog.  As it died another gun would bark, and another, until for a few seconds the noise dwindled and died altogether, and there was a silence; as if somebody, just for a second or two, had stopped the battle.  The German artillery Staff had left its gun barking too—­every now and again the little shell came and spat over the hill-side.

The morning broke very pale and white through the mist—­as though the earth were tired to death after that wild nightmare.  The soft white hand of the fog covered the red land, so that your sight ranged no more than three hundred yards at most, and often not a hundred.  We were stumbling over ground smashed in by the last night’s fire—­red earth new turned.  Only a few hundred yards away another fold of the land loomed out of the mist—­you could see the crest rising dull grey out of the white vapour in the dip between.  That hill-crest was in German territory—­not ours.  For which good reason we hurried to the shelter of a trench.

It was while we did so that I noticed a little grey procession coming towards us from the ground out beyond the trench in front of the German lines.  It came very slowly—­the steady, even pace of a funeral.  The leader was a man—­a weatherbeaten, square-jawed, rugged old bushman—­who marched solemnly, holding a stick in front of him, from which hung a flag.  Behind him came two men carrying, very tenderly and slowly, a stretcher.  By them walked a fourth man with a water-bottle.

They were the stretcher-bearers bringing in from out there some of the wreckage of the night before.  We went along the trench farther, and at a later stage we could see men in the mist in ones and twos out in front of the line.  A rifle or two from somewhere behind the mist were pecking regularly—­sniping from some German outpost; and it seemed not wise to show yourself too freely—­the mist was lifting, and you never knew whether the Germans were this side of it or not.  But though those bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the night’s attack hopping back from advanced shell-holes, the little procession with the flag passed through unharmed.  If the sniper saw it he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else.