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.
