They had, indeed, a quiet day.  Some of the men played cards, and Oscar read his Bible.  The night, too, began well.  But at four fifteen everybody was roused by the gas alarm.  Gas shells came over for exactly half an hour.  Then the shrapnel broke loose; not the long, whizzing scream of solitary shells, but drum-fire, continuous and deafening.  A hundred electrical storms seemed raging at once, in the air and on the ground.  Balls of fire were rolling all over the place.  The range was a little long for the Boar’s Head, they were not getting the worst of it; but thirty yards back everything was torn to pieces.  Claude didn’t see how anybody could be left alive back there.  A single twister had killed six of his men at the rear of the loop, where they were shovelling to keep the communication clear.  Captain Owns’ neat earthworks were being badly pounded.

Claude and Gerhardt were consulting together when the smoke and darkness began to take on the livid colour that announced the coming of daybreak.  A messenger ran in from the Colonel; the Missourians had not yet come up, and his telephone communication with them was cut off.  He was afraid they had got lost in the bombardment.  “The Colonel says you are to send two men back to bring them up; two men who can take charge if they’re stampeded.”

When the messenger shouted this order, Gerhardt and Hicks looked at each other quickly, and volunteered to go.

Claude hesitated.  Hicks and David waited for no further consent; they ran down the communication and disappeared.

Claude stood in the smoke that was slowly growing greyer, and looked after them with the deepest stab of despair he had ever known.  Only a man who was bewildered and unfit to be in command of other men would have let his best friend and his best officer take such a risk.  He was standing there under shelter, and his two friends were going back through that curtain of flying steel, toward the square from which the lost battalion had last reported.  If he knew them, they would not lose time following the maze of trenches; they were probably even now out on the open, running straight through the enemy barrage, vaulting trench tops.

Claude turned and went back into the loop.  Well, whatever happened, he had worked with brave men.  It was worth having lived in this world to have known such men.  Soldiers, when they were in a tight place, often made secret propositions to God; and now he found himself offering terms:  If They would see to it that David came back, They could take the price out of him.  He would pay.  Did They understand?

An hour dragged by.  Hard on the nerves, waiting.  Up the communication came a train with ammunition and coffee for the loop.  The men thought Headquarters did pretty well to get hot food to them through that barrage.  A message came up in the Colonel’s hand: 

“Be ready when the barrage stops.”

Claude took this up and showed it to the machine gunners in the Snout.  Turning back, he ran into Hicks, stripped to his shirt and trousers, as wet as if he had come out of the river, and splashed with blood.  His hand was wrapped up in a rag.  He put his mouth to Claude’s ear and shouted:  “We found them.  They were lost.  They’re coming.  Send word to the Colonel.”