CHAPTER IV

GRUB

"Penfold spoke of his escape without emotion. He had been long enough check by jowl with death to express no surprise. He had merely remarked that it was a lucky chance that the occupants of the shelled dug-out had not been inside when the heavy howitzer missile had demolished it. What did seriously annoy him was the loss of the promised food.

Penfold

Ralph Setley, although by this time ravenously hungry, was fervently thankful for his escape. Already the reaction of the raid into the German trenches was beginning to tell. Shorn of excitement of the wild rush over the top, the horrors of that nocturnal excursion rose up in his mind. The knowledge that he had bayoneted a fellow-creature, although he were an enemy and a brutal Hun, worried him.

"Suppose the fellow would have done me in if I hadn't got him first," he soliloquized. Then, aloud:

"What are you jabbering about, Alderhame?"

The former actor was stamping up and down the duck-boards, now encrusted with a thin coating of ice:—

 

 

"That's As You Like It! chum. It aptly describes our condition. Horribly cold, and benefits in the shape of bully-beef gone, though not forgotten. Where's our next lodging?"

The stream of prisoners and wounded Tommies had now dwindled. Penfold, addressing a sergeant, stated his case.

"D'ye think I'm a Cook's tourist guide?" snapped the N.C.O. "Turn in where you can. There are a good many half empty dug-outs now, I'm thinking."

A shell shrieked overhead. The Huns were putting up a barrage, the shrapnel falling amongst their own men, who, prisoners in the hands of the British, were being escorted to the "Advance cages."

"In here," said Penfold, making a dive for the nearest entrance. Alderhame followed close at his heels, then Setley and George Anderson, the latter still grousing at the loss of a quarter of an inch of his ear.

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