It was not a larky kind of place or time. There was no moon, and a light drizzle of rain fell. The enemy's trenches were about a thousand yards away, and their guns were busy in the night, so that the shells came overhead, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English woods now heard stranger night-birds crying through the air, with the noise of rushing wings, ending in a thunderclap.
"And my old mother thinks I'm enjoying myself!" said the heir to a seaside lodging-house.
"Thirsty work, this grave-digging job," said a lad who used to skate on rollers between the bath-chairs of Brighton promenade.
"Can't see much in those shells," said a young man who once sold ladies' blouses in an emporium of a south coast village. "How those newspaper chaps do try to frighten us!"
He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk.
A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise. Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of a beast.
"Machine-gums, my child. Keep your head down, or you'll lose hold of it... Steady, there. Don't get jumpy, now!"
The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way.
"Get up, Charlie," said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared voice, "Oh, Sergeant!"
"That's all right," said the sergeant-major. "We're getting off very lightly. New remember what I've been telling you... Stretcher this way."
They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New Army.
"Like old soldiers, sir," said the sergeant-major, when he stood chatting with the colonel after breakfast.
It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all--which made the Germans shell a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New Army were marching through to their quarters. These men had already seen what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received that unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process, and stood very still, listening to the infernal clatter as shells burst at the other end of the street, tumbling down huge masses of masonry and plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing great gashes out of red-brick walls.