Over their heads the great shells shrieked and rushed, round them crackled a spattering rifle fire, the occasional hammering of a machine gun, the rolling crash and whirr of bursting shells and flying splinters. Wide out to right and left of them, far to their front and rear the roar of battle ran, long-thundering and unbroken, in a deafening chorus of bellowing guns, the vibrating rattle of rifles and machine guns, the sharp detonations and reports of shells and bombs and grenades. But Pug and, in lesser degree, his companions, were quite heedless of all these things, of how the battle moved or stayed still. For them the struggle had boiled down into the solitary duel between Pug and his German; the larger issues were for the moment completely overshadowed, as in war they so often are, by the mere individual and personal ones. Pug insisted in finishing off his duel single-handed, declining to have the others there interfere in it. “It’s ’im or me for it,” he repeated, “fair dinkum. An’ I’m goin’ to get ’im _and_ ’is ’elmet on my blinkin’ own.” He decided at last to move his position, to crawl along and try to catch his opponent in flank, to stalk his enemy as a hunter stalks a hidden buck. Since he could not escape from the crater they were in without exposing himself to that watchful rifle, he scraped down with his entrenching tool a couple of feet of the rim of the crater where it formed a wall dividing off another crater. When he had cleared the passage he came back and fired another shot, just to keep his enemy watching in the same spot for him, and hurriedly crawled over into the next crater, squirmed and wriggled away from it along cracks and holes and folds of the torn and tumbled ground in a direction that he reckoned would allow him to reach the German sheltering in his hole and behind a broken hillock of earth. But before he reached such a position as he desired he found himself looking over into a deep crater occupied by an officer and half a dozen men with a machine gun. The officer looked up and caught sight of him. “Hullo, Sneath,” he said. “Where are you off to? You’re moving the wrong way, aren’t you? The order was to retire, and you’re moving forward.” Pug wriggled over into the crater and crouched puffing and blowing for a moment. “I ’adn’t ’eard nothin’ about retiring, sir,” he said doubtfully. “That’s the order,” said the officer briskly. “I don’t know what it means any more than you do, but there it is. You’d better wait now and move back with us.”