Dell and Oscar made a chair of their crossed hands and carried the woman, she was no great weight.  Bert picked up the little boy with the pink clock; “Come along, little frog, your legs ain’t long enough.”

Claude walked behind, holding the screaming baby stiffly in his arms.  How was it possible for a baby to have such definite personality, he asked himself, and how was it possible to dislike a baby so much?  He hated it for its square, tow-thatched head and bloodless ears, and carried it with loathing... no wonder it cried!  When it got nothing by screaming and stiffening, however, it suddenly grew quiet; regarded him with pale blue eyes, and tried to make itself comfortable against his khaki coat.  It put out a grimy little fist and took hold of one of his buttons.  “Kamerad, eh?” he muttered, glaring at the infant.  “Cut it out!”

Before they had their own supper that night, the boys carried hot food and blankets down to their family.

VIII

Four o’clock... a summer dawn... his first morning in the trenches.

Claude had just been along the line to see that the gun teams were in position.  This hour, when the light was changing, was a favourite time for attack.  He had come in late last night, and had everything to learn.  Mounting the firestep, he peeped over the parapet between the sandbags, into the low, twisting mist.  Just then he could see nothing but the wire entanglement, with birds hopping along the top wire, singing and chirping as they did on the wire fences at home.  Clear and flute-like they sounded in the heavy air,—­and they were the only sounds.  A little breeze came up, slowly clearing the mist away.  Streaks of green showed through the moving banks of vapour.  The birds became more agitated.  That dull stretch of grey and green was No Man’s Land.  Those low, zigzag mounds, like giant molehills protected by wire hurdles, were the Hun trenches; five or six lines of them.  He could easily follow the communication trenches without a glass.  At one point their front line could not be more than eighty yards away, at another it must be all of three hundred.  Here and there thin columns of smoke began to rise; the Hun was getting breakfast; everything was comfortable and natural.  Behind the enemy’s position the country rose gradually for several miles, with ravines and little woods, where, according to his map, they had masked artillery.  Back on the hills were ruined farmhouses and broken trees, but nowhere a living creature in sight.  It was a dead, nerveless countryside, sunk in quiet and dejection.  Yet everywhere the ground was full of men.  Their own trenches, from the other side, must look quite as dead.  Life was a secret, these days.