I stepped over it, and my foot came down on to more wire, which rattled with a noise that made me stand stock still awaiting something to happen. I felt like a cat who has upset a tablecloth and all the tea things. I stood appalled at the unexpected clatter. But really it was hardly audible to _our_ sentries, much less to the Germans at least a hundred and twenty yards away. [Illustration] At last I got through and flopped down. Immediately Will’s form showed up dark in front of me. When I was standing up, I had been unable to see him against the black ground. We lay about a minute absolutely quiet, according to arrangement. I had fairly made the plunge now, and I felt like the bather shaking his hair as he comes up for the first time, and shouting out how glorious it is. I was elated. The feel of the wet grass was good under my hands; the silence was good; the immense loneliness, save for Will’s black form, was good; and a slight rustle of wind in the grass was good also. I just wanted to lie, and enjoy it. I hoped Will would not go on for another minute. But soon he began to crawl. Have you done much crawling? It is slow work. You take knee-steps, and they are not like footsteps: they are not a hundred and twenty to the hundred yards They are more like fifty to ten yards, I should think. Anyway it seemed endless. The end of the sap was, to be precise, just one hundred and twenty-five yards from our front trench. Yet when I had gone, I suppose, forty yards, I expected to be on it any minute. Will must be going wrong. I thought of the map. Could we be going north-east instead of north? Will halted. I nearly bumped into his right foot, which raised itself twice, signalling a halt. I took out my compass, and looked at it. I shaded it with my hand, the luminous arrow seemed so bright: “rather absurd,” I thought immediately, “as if the Boches could possibly see it from the trench.” But we were going straight enough. Then the figure in front moved on, and I came up to where he had halted. It was the edge of a big shell-hole, full of water; I put my left hand in up to the wrist, I don’t know why. Still the figure crawled on, with a sort of hump-backed sidle that I had got to know by now. It was interminable this crawling.... “Swis--s--sh.” A German flare shot up from ever so close. It seemed to be falling right over us. Then it burst with a “pop.” I had my head down on my arms, but I could squint out sideways. It seemed impossible we should not be seen; for there, hardly twenty yards away, was the German wire, as clear as anything. Meanwhile the flare had fallen behind us. Would it never go out? I noticed the way the blades of grass were lit up by it; and there was an old tin or something.... I started as a rat ran across the grass past me. I wondered if it were a German rat, or one of ours.