When the guides arrived and the representatives from each platoon were assembled it was night, and so dark that one could not see another in front of him. A lieutenant and a sergeant from the Intelligence section led the way, with Hicks and Bullis sandwiched in the middle of the long line that kept from separating by the man in rear holding to the shoulder of the man in front of him. Instead of leaving the trench by Hicks’s shell hole, the party turned in the opposite direction, and, after walking along the slippery duck boards for ten or more minutes, climbed over a firing bay and worked their way through a path that a succession of well-placed shells had blown in the barbed wire. Their feet, scuffing through the tall grass, hissed like a scythe cutting heavy weeds. That, and an occasional cough, were the only noises of the night. Suddenly Hicks’s foot struck a large, yielding substance. He felt with his feet, prodding into the thing, which caused a fearful stench to rise. “Hey, what’s this?” he softly called, and the Intelligence-section sergeant came running back only to exclaim in a voice that had been hardened by one other raiding party: “That? Why, that’s only a dead Boche.” A moment afterward an automatic rifle broke nervously into a series of put-put-puts. As one man, the party fell flat on their stomachs. “Put-put-put. Put-put-put,” said the automatic rifle. “Damnation,” Bedford cursed. “It’s somebody from our lines firing at us.” “Well, don’t talk so loud,” one of the men said angrily, “or you’ll have both sides on us.” The lieutenant from the Intelligence section gave orders for the men to lie prone and to crawl after him. After a while he rose, motioning for the others to get up. “I think,” he said, talking to Bedford in an undertone, “that this is the place where we get back in the trench. Let’s count up our men and see if they are all here.” They counted as many times as a surgeon counts the sponges he uses in an operation, but each count only made more certain that there was one man missing. Investigation showed them that the lost man was Corporal Olin, from the adjoining company. While they were debating upon what course to take, they noticed from their lines a green rocket fired into the air. “Gas,” hoarsely cried the lieutenant of the Intelligence section, struggling to get on his respirator. * * * * * Poor Hicks knew not what to do. Before the rocket had been fired he had about decided to return to look for the missing corporal. But with a respirator on he could hardly breathe, not to consider finding his way in the dark. But of a sudden he whipped off his mask and started off in the direction from which they had crawled. No one noticed his leaving, for each man was too much taken up with his own affairs.