"It looks perfectly safe."
He shrugged his shoulders and glanced toward the German trenches.
"They have been sleeping during the rain," he said briefly. "But when
one of them wakes up, look out!"
After that there was little conversation, and what there was was in
whispers.
As we proceeded the stench from the beautiful moonlit water grew
overpowering. The officer told me the reason.
A little farther along a path of fascines had been built out over the
inundation to an outpost halfway to the German trenches. The building
of this narrow roadway had cost many lives.
Half a mile along the road we were sharply challenged by a sentry.
When he had received the password he stood back and let us pass.
Alone, in that bleak and exposed position in front of the trenches,
always in full view as he paced back and forward, carbine on shoulder,
with not even a tree trunk or a hedge for shelter, the first to go at
the whim of some German sniper or at any indication of an attack, he
was a pathetic, almost a tragic, figure. He looked very young too. I
stopped and asked him in a whisper how old he was.
He said he was nineteen!
He may have been. I know something about boys, and I think he was
seventeen at the most. There are plenty of boys of that age doing just
what that lad was doing.
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