As I stood in the doorway three civilian youths approached, two of them supporting a third between them. The lad in the middle looked white and scarcely able to stand. I went up to see if I could do anything. The two with him told me that they had found the boy lying in a field; he had been hit in five places by shrapnel. They thought he must have been lying there unattended for three days. The boy himself watched me with dumb, pain-ridden eyes. Very weakly and slowly he raised his hand to his mouth and pointed to his tongue, which was black and swollen. "_Soif_," he whispered. Of course, he had had no water all the time. I had him taken into a cottage and laid on a table. I got a glass of water from a well and held it to his lips. He was too weak to raise his head, but his friends supported him, and he drank the water slowly and steadily. As he drank a little smile played about his lips, and when the glass was empty, before they laid him down, he nodded his head and smiled at me as only those smile for whom one has done some last service and whose life is nearly done. I made my way back to the farm with sickness in my heart. Not all the fighting nor the strain of war had affected me as the sight of those suffering, helpless people whose ground we were using for our battlefield. That night we said good-bye to the farmer's wife and pushed on beyond the farm. We were all happy to feel we were leaving her behind the security of our lines. As she stood at the door and watched us go there was still the same look in her eyes as when we came--a look of sadness, resignation, and infinite courage. XIII. PUSHING FORWARD An hour before dawn the men stood to their arms in the trenches, but as the daylight grew and there was no sound or sight of the enemy, first one man and then another got out of the trench. These being allowed to walk about with impunity the others soon followed their example. Fires were lit for cooking, and men spread themselves on the ground behind the trench reading old copies of newspapers, or mending their clothes, or cleaning their rifles. Here and there parties could be seen carrying away corpses which had been stiff and cold behind the trench for the last forty-eight hours. Goyle, my company commander, walked across from his headquarters. The day before it had been impossible for him to get to us, and messages were brought by orderlies, who crawled up on their stomachs along a narrow ditch. "Morning," said Goyle; "looks as though they had cleared." "Yes, sir," I answered, "there has been no sign of anything ahead this morning." "I reckon that was their transport we heard, sir--they was rumbling along a road there, sir, all the night," said my platoon-sergeant.