“There _is_ a mine,” we all exclaimed together.
“I wonder if it’s ours, or theirs,” said Edwards.
“I saw Hills, this afternoon,” I answered, “and he said nothing about a mine. I’m sure he would have, if we had been going to send one up. No, I bet that’s a Boche mine. Good thing you’re out of it, Clark. Oh, don’t go. Well, cheero! if you must. Look us up oftener. Good luck!”
Clark departed, and I resumed _Blackwood’s_.
“I say, Edwards,” said I, after a while. “This stuff of Ian Hay’s is awfully good. This about the signallers is _top-hole_. You can simply smell it!”
“There you are,” I said at last. “It’s called ‘Carry On’; there have been several others in the same series. You know the ‘First Hundred Thousand’?”
“Good stuff,” said I. “Good readable stuff; the sort you’d give to your people at home. But it leaves out bits.”
“Oh, well, the utter fed-upness, and the dullness--and--well, oh, I don’t know. You read it and see.”
That was a bad night. The Boche mine had caught our R.E.’s this time. All the night through they were rescuing fellows from our mine gallery. Seven or eight were killed, most of them “gassed”; two of “A” Company were badly gassed too while aiding in the rescue work. This mine gas is, I suppose, very like that encountered in coal mines; and the explosion of big charges of cordite must create cracks and fissures underground that release these gases in all directions. I do not profess to write as an expert on this. At any rate they were all night working to get the fellows out. One man when rescued disobeyed the doctor’s strict injunctions to lie still for half an hour before moving away from where he was put, just outside the mine shaft; and this cost him his life. He hurried down the Old Kent Road, and dropped dead with heart failure at the bottom of it. Hills told me he felt the pulses of two men who had been gassed and were waiting the prescribed half-hour; and they were going like a watch ticking. Yes, it was a bad night. I got snatches of sleep, but always there was the sound of stretchers being carried past our dug-out to the doctor’s dressing-station; several times I went out to investigate how things were going. But there was nothing I could do. It was my duty to sleep: we were going up in the line to-morrow. But sleep does not always come to order.