While "C" slogged away at making connection right through, we lay out by the wire, as we had done the night before, and I crept up and down our line. There was no rain, and the night was so quiet that we could hear every little move among the diggers much more plainly than on the night before. I wondered if the Boches could hear it. They sent us little bursts of machine-gun fire now and again, such as they send throughout every night; and there was the normal amount of rifle fire and the normal number of flares and different kinds of lights going up from the enemy lines. Our men all lay as still as mutton, and when the lights rose near our way, or the M.G. fire came, I naturally kept very still. Once I distinctly made out a figure moving very slowly and cautiously outside the wire. I should like to have fired, and, better still, to have been able to get quickly and silently through the wire and on to that moving figure, getting to grips, as we did with that German sniper not long since, without a sound. But there was no opening in the wire near; and with regard to firing, my orders were not to draw fire by expending a single round unnecessarily, and to fire only in defence. What I did was to get the O.C.'s permission shortly afterwards to take three men and patrol beyond the front of the wire. But we found nothing. No doubt I had seen one member of a Boche observation patrol on the prowl to find out what we were doing; and if only I could have got him it would have been excellent. From that time on we kept a continuous patrol going in front of the wire. Then came a salvo of four whizz-bangs, all landing fairly near the new trench; three in rear of it, and one most infernally close in front of us. I suppose we all told ourselves the ball was just about to begin. But nothing happened for over an hour. Then came nine shells in quick succession, one of which, on my left, robbed my half-Company of four men, one killed and three wounded. The rest accomplished nothing. Then silence again, followed by occasional bursts of M.G. and the usual sort of rifle fire. Corporal Lane, of No. 2 Platoon, stopped a M.G. bullet with his left shoulder, I regret to say, and one man in the trench--"C" Company--was killed by a bullet through the head. With every little burst of fire, one braced oneself for the big strafe that we naturally felt must come. It seemed the Boche was playing with us as a cat plays with a mouse. "I wonder what devilry he's got up his sleeve?" We probably all asked ourselves that question fifty times.