The half hour limit brought us to a murky daylight and an old and sloppy support trench which bordered the track and into which we flung ourselves, to lay in the water in a dull stupor that was neither sleep nor honest waking. Later, when the rations had been "dished out" we bestirred ourselves and so found or dug queer coffin-shaped shelves in either wall. Out of courtesy we called them dug-outs. I do not remember that any one spoke much of the dead. The rain stopped and for a time the unaccustomed sun came out. We drove stakes in the walls above our coffins, hunted sand-bags and hung them and spare equipment over the open face and then crawled back into the water which, as usual, was already forming in the hollows that our hips made where we lay. Until noon there was little heard but the thick breathing of weary men. Occasionally one tossed and shouted blasphemous warnings anent imaginary and bursting shells; whereat those within hearing whined in a tired and hopeless anger, and, if close by, kicked him. Trench nerves. All day the fire of many guns sprayed us. Near by, the well defined emplacement of one of our own batteries inevitably drew to the entire vicinity a heavy fire so that one shell broke fair amongst our sleeping men. CHAPTER IV MAJOR GAULT COMES BACK "The King Is Dead": "Long Live the King"--Back to Belle-waarde--The Seventh of May. That was on the fifth. In the afternoon young Park came to us. He was the Commanding Officer's orderly. There was down on his face but he was full of all that strange wisdom of a trenchman who had experienced the bitter hardships and the heartbreaking losses of a winter in the cursed salient of St. Eloi, by Shelley Farm and The Mound of Death. But just now this infant of the trenches had the round eyes of a startled child, which in him meant mad excitement. "The C.O.'s hit." The word slid up the trench: "The C.O.'s hit." "Strike me! Cawn't this bleedin' regiment keep a bleedin' Colonel----? That makes two of them!" "How did it happen?" "What the devil are we goin' to do?" "Who says so?" "The second in six weeks!" "Parkie." "By----! This mob's in a Hell of a fix, Bo'." Park was leaning on his rifle, trench fashion. "Oh, dry up. You give me a pain." And then he launched his thunderbolt, "Gault's back." The chorus of despair became one of wild delight. "We're jake!" "He'll see us through." "Where is he?" "How's his arm?" "The son-of-a-gun! Couldn't keep him away, could they?" "No fear. Not 'im. Bloody well wanted to be wiv 'is bleedin' boys, 'e did. 'E ain't bloody well goin' to do 'is bloody solderin' in a 'cushy' job in Blighty--like some of 'em. Not after rysin' us. Do it wiv 'is bloody self like a man; an' that's wot 'e is." The speaker glared accusingly; but his declaration agreed too well with what all thought for any one to take exception to it. The new Commanding Officer had been wounded at St. Eloi on March 1st and this was our first intimation of his return.