[20]

The platoon marched up in the pitch-black night, slipping, from time to time, off the slimy duck boards which had been placed in the bottom of the trench to prevent traffic from being buried in the mud. Their packs, with hip rubber boots, bandoliers of ammunition, bombs, and shovels, bowed them over as they cautiously and cursingly made their way through the communication trench.

Somewhere ahead a white light flared with a sputtering noise.

“Stand fast!” Lieutenant Bedford called out peremptorily.

The men stood as rocks, their arms crooked, covering their faces. The light dropped slowly and unemotionally to the ground, dying out. Again all was blackness.

Sergeant Harriman, who had gone ahead as billeting officer, now joined the platoon and piloted the men into the trench. The main trench was much wider than the communication trench, but passage along it was difficult because of the half-checkered manner in which it had been laid out.

[21]

[21]

Not waiting to be relieved, the French soldiers one by one had disappeared into the night. Now the platoon stood silent and ill at ease. No one knew where to go, and so the entire body was ordered to remain standing in the firing bays until morning.

Dawn broke upon a desolate field where rusty barbed wire clung awkwardly to the posts on which it had been strung. There were a few gnarled and stunted trees, the wreck of what once had been a French farmhouse, and that was all. Hicks peered over the parapet, wondering how near he was to the enemy. He stepped upon the firing step of firm clay. A few yards away were the torn and rusted tracks of the Paris-Metz railway. Beyond that was just an uncared-for field, which, in the distance, lost itself in the gray of the horizon.

He experienced a strange feeling of awe, as if he were looking upon another world. The early sun threw the trees and barbed wire into a queer perspective and gave them a harsh, unreal aspect.

In the early springtime this particular sector looked very much like one of the calm farms which Hicks was accustomed to see in many[22] parts of Ohio. The birds sang as lightheartedly, the sun was as bright, the grass was as green and fragrant over the slightly rolling field. All was quite as it should be. Only Hicks was out of the 

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