‘Good lad,’ said Bourne. ‘You are a champion scrounger, Martlow.’

He was thinking that the anxiety of the R.E.’s to get away did not indicate that it was a particularly cushy place. Shem had also been reconnoitring the position, and announced that there was a decent cellar, with most of a house in ruins on top of it, only about twenty yards away. Martlow then decorated the door with a paper on which he had printed with an indelible pencil RELAY POST in block letters.

‘Well, we may as well have some tea an’ bully,’ said Shem.

It was after one o’clock, so they set to, and had a good comforting meal, and lounged about smoking until a little after two, when a message came from the trenches. One of the regular runners brought it, with Pacey. It was a regulation that two runners should take a message together, in case one might be wounded, but this was often disregarded owing to a shortage of runners: it was tacitly assumed that one of them would go at a time, so that in case of simultaneous messages both ways the post would not be without a man on duty. Shem and Martlow took the message to Brigade H.Q., just the other side of Courcelles, and Pacey and Hankin, the regular runner, sat and yarned with Bourne for a few minutes.

‘You look all right ’ere, but Fritz ’as been bashin’ the place about, ’asn’t ’e?’ said Pacey.

Part of the mud wall had come away, leaving only laths. After a cigarette, Pacey and Hankin set off back to the trenches. Bourne sat in a kind of reverie for about half an hour until Shem and Martlow returned, and idle talk continued for a time.

The whole air suddenly became alive, and crash after crash filled the town. They were stunned, and petrified, for a moment. More of the mud wall fell away, and there was a landslide of tiles. They cowered down, as though they wanted to shrink away to nothing. It was heavy stuff coming over. One shell struck the Café de la Jeunesse, and another corner of it went flying in all directions; loose tiles kept falling, and the walls rapidly became threadbare lath, merely from the effects of the concussion. Bourne felt himself shaking, but they couldn’t stay there.

‘Get into that cellar!’ he shouted to them; and grabbing their rifles and water-bottles, which they had taken out, they moved out uncertainly. Bourne felt his breath coming heavily. Shells were bumping practically the whole length of the village. He didn’t know what to do about the relay-post; and though he felt an awful fool, he decided.

‘I’ll be after you,’ he shouted, and running, as a man runs into a rain-storm, he disappeared into the street. He turned the corner and continued downhill to the control’s dug-out. On the hillside just beyond the control’s dug-out a man lay dead. His tin-hat was blown some yards away, and the top of the head had been taken off, so that at a glance one saw some remnants of the scattered brains. Apparently the whole of Colincamps was going west, clouds of smoke and dust rose from it. Bourne fell down the steps of the dug-out. He couldn’t say why he was there at first.