Nothing different happened until about three-quarters of an hour had passed. Winterbourne got colder and colder, felt he had been out there at least three hours, and thought he must have been forgotten. He shivered with cold. Suddenly, he thought he saw something move to his right, just outside the wire. He gazed intently, all tense and alert. Yes, a dark something was moving. It stopped, and seemed to vanish. Then near it another dark figure moved and then a third. It was a patrol, making for the gap in the wire in front of Winterbourne. Were they Germans or British? He pointed his rifle towards them, got the bombs ready, and waited. They came nearer and nearer. Just before they got to the wire, Winterbourne challenged in a loud whisper: “Halt, who are you?” All three figures instantly disappeared. “Halt, who are you?” “Friend,” came a low answer. “Give the word or I fire.” “Lantern.” “All right.” One of the men crawled through the wire to Winterbourne, followed by the other two. They wore balaclava helmets, and carried revolvers. “Are you the patrol?” whispered Winterbourne. “Who the muckin hell d’you think we are? Father Christmas? What are you doin’ out here?” “Pioneers digging a sap about fifteen yards behind.” “Are you Pioneers?” “Yes.” “Got a bit o’ candle, chum?” “Sorry, I haven’t, we don’t get them issued.” The patrol crawled off, and Winterbourne heard an alarmed challenge from the men working in the sap, and the word “Lantern.” A Verey light went up from the German lines just as the patrol were crawling over the parapet. A German sentry fired his rifle and a machine-gun started up. The patrol dropped hastily into the trench. The machine-gun bullets whistled cruelly past Winterbourne’s head—Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. He crouched down in the hole. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. Then silence. He lifted his head, and continued to watch. For two or three minutes there was complete silence. The men in the sap seemed to have knocked off work, and made no sound. Winterbourne listened intently. No sound. It was the most ghostly, desolate, deathly silence he had ever experienced. He had never imagined that death could be so deathly. The feeling of annihilation, of the end of existence, of a dead planet of the dead arrested in a dead time and space, penetrated his flesh along with the cold. He shuddered. So frozen, so desolate, so dead a world—everything smashed and lying inertly broken. Then “crack-ping” went a sniper’s rifle, and a battery of field-guns opened out with salvos about half a mile to his right. The machine-guns began again. The noise was a relief after that ghastly dead silence.