The Sergeant-Major was the last to lie down. Only after everyone else had ceased work, and he had visited each gun in turn and satisfied himself that all was correct, and made his report to the Battery Commander, did he seek his own rest. Then he crawled into one of the pits, and before he slept had a few words with the “Number One” there, his old friend Duncan. The Sergeant-Major, feeling in his pockets for a match to light a cigarette, found the note which the Battery Commander had sent back and which had been passed on to him. He turned his torchlight on it and read it through to Duncan—“Bring up the guns and firing battery waggons ...” and then chuckled a little. “Bring up the guns.... Remember that picture we saw before we joined, Duncan? And we fancied then we’d be bringing ’em up same fashion. And, good Lord, think of to-night.” “Yes,” grunted Duncan, “sad slump from our anticipations. There was some fun in that picture style of doing the job—some sort of dash and honour and glory. No honour and glory about ‘Bring up the guns’ these days. Napoo in it to-night anyway.” The Sergeant-Major, sleepily sucking his damp cigarette, wrapped in his sopping British Warm, curling up in a corner on the wet cold earth, utterly spent with the night’s work, cordially agreed. Perhaps, and anyhow one hopes, some people will think they were wrong. XIV OUR BATTERY’S PRISONER IT was in the very small hours of a misty grey morning that the Lieutenant was relieved at the Forward Observing Position in the extreme front line established after the advance, and set out with his Signaller to return to the Battery. His way took him over the captured ground and the maze of captured trenches and dug-outs more or less destroyed by bombardment, and because there were still a number of German shells coming over the two kept as nearly as possible to a route which led them along or close to the old trenches, and so under or near some sort of cover. The two were tired after a strenuous day, which had commenced the previous dawn in the Battery O.P.,[5] and finished in the ruined building in the new front line, and a couple of hours’ sleep in a very cold and wet cellar. The Lieutenant, plodding over the wet ground, went out of his way to walk along a part of trench where his Battery had been wire-cutting, and noted with a natural professional interest and curiosity the nature and extent of the damage done to the old enemy trenches and wire, when his eye suddenly caught the quick movement of a shadowy grey figure, which whisked instantly out of sight somewhere along the trench they were in.