“Well, down there it’s fearfully interesting. I didn’t go far up the gallery where they’re working, because you can’t easily pass along; but the R.E. officer took me along a gallery that is not being worked, and there, all alone, at the end of it was a man sitting. He was simply sitting, listening. Then I listened through his stethoscope thing ...”
“I know,” I interposed. It is an instrument like a doctor’s stethoscope, and by it you can hear underground sounds a hundred yards away as clearly as if they were five yards off.
“... and I could hear the Boche working as plainly as anything. Good heavens, it sounded about a yard off. Yet they told me it was forty yards. By Jove, it was weird. ‘Pick ... pick ... pick.’ I thought it must be our fellows really, but theirs made a different sound, and not a bit the same. But, you know, that fellow sitting there alone ... as we went away and left him, he looked round at us with staring eyes just like a hunted animal. To sit there for hours on end, listening. Of course, while you hear them working, it’s all right, they won’t blow. But if you _don’t_ hear them! My God, I wouldn’t like to be an R.E. It’s an awful game.”
“By Jove,” said Edwards. “How fearfully interesting! Is it cold down there?”
“I must go down,” I said. “We always laugh at these R.E.’s for looking like navvies, and for going about without gas-helmets or rifles. But really they are wonderful men. It’s awful being liable to be buried alive any moment. Somehow death in the open is far less terrible. Ugh! Do you remember that R.E., Teddy, we saw running down the Old Kent Road? It was that night the Boche blew the mine in the Quarry. Jove, Clark, that was a sight. I was just going up from Trafalgar Square, when I heard a running, and there was a fellow, great big brawny fellow, naked to the waist, and _grey_ all over; and someone had given him his equipment and rifle in a hurry, and he’d got his equipment over his bare skin! The men were fearfully amused. ‘R.E.,’ they said, and smiled. But, by God, there was a death look in that man’s eyes. He’d been down when the Boche blew their mine, and as near as possible buried alive. No, it’s a rotten game.”
As I spoke, the ground shuddered, and the tea-things shook.