Staff officers on both sides had long since read the last pink signal
form, and had given instructions to cover any possible trouble, and had
turned into bed. The normal early morning gun was sending its normal
shell at intervals ranging up the long valley--_rattle, rattle, rattle_,
until the echo died away up the slopes, like that of a vanishing railway
train, or the long-drawn bark of a dog. As it died another gun would
bark, and another, until for a few seconds the noise dwindled and died
altogether, and there was a silence; as if somebody, just for a second
or two, had stopped the battle. The German artillery Staff had left its
gun barking too--every now and again the little shell came and spat over
the hill-side.

The morning broke very pale and white through the mist--as though the
earth were tired to death after that wild nightmare. The soft white hand
of the fog covered the red land, so that your sight ranged no more than
three hundred yards at most, and often not a hundred. We were stumbling
over ground smashed in by the last night's fire--red earth new turned.
Only a few hundred yards away another fold of the land loomed out of the
mist--you could see the crest rising dull grey out of the white vapour
in the dip between. That hill-crest was in German territory--not ours.
For which good reason we hurried to the shelter of a trench.

It was while we did so that I noticed a little grey procession coming
towards us from the ground out beyond the trench in front of the German
lines. It came very slowly--the steady, even pace of a funeral. The
leader was a man--a weatherbeaten, square-jawed, rugged old bushman--who
marched solemnly, holding a stick in front of him, from which hung a
flag. Behind him came two men carrying, very tenderly and slowly, a
stretcher. By them walked a fourth man with a water-bottle.