There was no enemy to be seen and not even a puff of smoke to suggest his whereabouts. But the air was full of the booming of heavy guns and the rising eerie shriek of the shrapnel.
Behind the line of red earth lay the British, each man with his rifle cuddled lovingly to his shoulder, a useless weapon that yet conveyed a sense of comfort. The shells were bursting with hideous accuracy--sharp flashes of white light, a loud report and then a murderous rain of shrapnel.
"Crikey!" said a little man in filthy rain-sodden khaki, as a handful of earth rose up and hit him on the shoulder; "crikey! that was a narsty shave for your uncle!"
The big man beside him grunted and shifted half an inch of dead cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other. "You can 'old my 'and," said he with a grin.
Four or five places up the trench a man stumbled to his knee, coughed with a rush of blood and toppled over dead.
"Dahn and aht," said the big man gruffly. "Gawd! If we could get at 'em!"
The wail of a distant shell rose to a shriek and the explosion was instantaneous. The little man suddenly went limp and his rifle rolled down the bank of the trench.
His friend looked at him with unspeakable anguish. "Got it--in the perishing neck this time, Bill," gasped the little man.
Bill leaned over and propped his pal's head on his shoulder. A large dark stain was saturating the wounded man's tunic and he lay very still.
"Bill," very faintly; then, with surprise, "Blimey! 'E's blubbing! Poor old Bill!"
The big man was shaking with strangled sobs. For some moments he held his friend close, and it was the dying man who spoke first.
"Are we dahn-'earted?" he said. The whisper went along the line and swelled into a roar.
The big man choked back his sobs. "No, old pal, no!" he answered, and "No-o-o-o!" roared the line in unison.
The little man lay back with a contented sigh. "No," he repeated, and closed his eyes for ever.
The Grey Men of the South They look to glim of seas, This gentle day of drouth And sleepy Autumn bees, Pale skies and wheeling hawk And scent of trodden thyme, Brown butterflies and chalk And the sheep-bells' chime.
The Grey Men they are old, Ah, very old they be; They've stood upside the wold Since all eternity; They standed in a ring And the elk-bull roared to them When SOLOMON was king In famed Jerusalem.