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.
The night was awfully still. I use the adverb not as Dick Cheeser
would have used it. The stillness awed him. There had not been a shell
all night. He put his head up over the parapet and waited. Nobody
fired at him. He felt that the night was waiting for him. He heard
voices going along the trench: some one said it was a black night: the
voices died away. A mere phrase; the night wasn’t black at all, it was
grey. Dick Cheeser was staring at it, and the night was staring back
at him, and seemed to be threatening him; it was grey, grey as an old
cat that they used to have at home, and as artful. Yes, thought Dick
Cheeser, it was an artful night; that was what was wrong with it. If
shells had come or the Germans, or anything at all, you would know how
to take it; but that quiet mist over huge valleys, and stillness!
Anything might happen. Dick waited and waited, and the night waited
too. He felt they were watching each other, the night and he. He felt
that each was crouching. His mind slipped back to the woods on hills
he knew. He was watching with eyes and ears and imagination to see
what would happen in No Man’s Land under that ominous mist: but his
mind took a peep for all that at the old woods that he knew. He
pictured himself, he and a band of boys, chasing squirrels again in
the summer. They used to chase a squirrel from tree to tree, throwing
stones, till they tired it: and then they might hit it with a stone:
usually not. Sometimes the squirrel would hide, and a boy would have
to climb after it. It was great sport, thought Dick Cheeser. What a
pity he hadn’t had a catapult in those days, he thought. Somehow the
years when he had not had a catapult seemed all to be wasted years.
With a catapult one might get the squirrel almost at once, with luck:
and what a great thing that would be. All the other boys would come
round to look at the squirrel, and to look at the catapult, and ask
him how he did it. He wouldn’t have to say much, there would be the
squirrel; no boasting would be necessary with the squirrel lying dead.
It might spread to other things, even rabbits; almost anything, in
fact. He would certainly get a catapult first thing when he got home.
A little wind blew in the night, too cold for summer. It blew away, as
it were, the summer of Dick’s memories; blew away hills and woods and
squirrel. It made for a moment a lane in the mist over No Man’s Land.
Dick Cheeser peered down it, but it closed again. “No,” Night seemed
to say, “you don’t guess my secret.” And the awful hush intensified.
“What would they do?” thought the sentry. “What were they planning
in all those miles of silence?” Even the Verys were few. When one
went up, far hills seemed to sit and brood over the valley: their
black shapes seemed to know what would happen in the mist and seemed
sworn not to say. The rocket faded, and the hills went back into
mystery again, and Dick Cheeser peered level again over the ominous
valley.
All the dangers and sinister shapes and evil destinies, lurking
between the armies in that mist, that the sentry faced that night
cannot be told until the history of the war is written by a historian
who can see the mind of the soldier. Not a shell fell all night, no
German stirred; Dick Cheeser was relieved at “Stand to” and his
comrades stood to beside him, and soon it was wide, golden, welcome
dawn.
And for all the threats of night the thing that happened was one that
the lonely sentry had never foreseen: in the hour of his watching Dick
Cheeser, though scarcely eighteen, became a full-grown man.