And there, after a while, descends the Tok Emma man, the officer commanding a trench mortar battery, and is given perchance a whiskey and water, and sits on the best empty box that we have to offer, and lights one of our cigarettes. “There’s going to be a bit of a strafe at 5.30,” he says. What Happened on the Night of the Twenty-Seventh The night of the twenty-seventh was Dick Cheeser’s first night on sentry. The night was far gone when he went on duty; in another hour they would stand to. Dick Cheeser had camouflaged his age when he enlisted: he was barely eighteen. A wonderfully short time ago he was quite a little boy; now he was in a frontline trench. It hadn’t seemed that things were going to alter like that. Dick Cheeser was a plowboy: long brown furrows over haughty, magnificent downs seemed to stretch away into the future as far as his mind could see. No narrow outlook either, for the life of nations depends upon those brown furrows. But there are the bigger furrows that Mars makes, the long brown trenches of war; the life of nations depends on these too; Dick Cheeser had never pictured these. He had heard talk about a big navy and a lot of Dreadnoughts; silly nonsense he called it. What did one want a big navy for? To keep the Germans out, some people said. But the Germans weren’t coming. If they wanted to come, why didn’t they come? Anybody could see that they never did come. Some of Dick Cheeser’s pals had votes. And so he had never pictured any change from plowing the great downs; and here was war at last, and here was he. The Corporal showed him where to stand, told him to keep a good lookout and left him. And there was Dick Cheeser alone in the dark with an army in front of him, eighty yards away: and, if all tales were true, a pretty horrible army.