Night had come. There
had been a big battle that day, and our army had taken the enemy’s front line
and then advanced half a mile beyond it. We were now in a trench which the
enemy had dug as a last line of defense, and we could hear them digging themselves
a new trench from which to face us in the morning. They dug in the stony soil
all night, and by the morning we could see only the tops of their caps and
their spades as they threw the earth out.
In our trench,
several of our soldiers spent the time after daylight had come shooting at the enemy caps and spades to see if they could hit any of them.
One of the enemy
soldiers, who seemed to be a sportsman, joined in our game. He would suddenly
put his spade up, keep it there for a few seconds to see whether one of us
could hit it, and then pull it down quickly again. Next time he would put it up in rather a
different place. A number of our soldiers shot at it whenever it came up, but
none of them seemed to succeed in hitting it.
Then there came a
time when the spade remained down for much longer than usual. We thought that
the soldier might have been stopped from playing this game by an officer, or
that he might have gone off for a meal or something. But just when we thought that we would not see his spade
again, it came up once more, for the last time-very slowly, and with a bandage
tied around it.
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