He looked about him, went straight to the blanket, and took up the water-bottle. It must have seemed lighter than he expected, for he shook it a little suspiciously before uncorking it. He took a long steady drink and paused.

‘I left this bottle full of whiskey,’ he said, ‘but those bloody Jocks must have smelt it. You know, Bourne, I don’t go over with a skinful, as some of them do; but, by God, when I come back I want it. Here, take a pull yourself; you look as though you could do with one.’

Bourne took the bottle without any hesitation; his case was much the same. One had lived instantaneously during that timeless interval, for in the shock and violence of the attack, the perilous instant, on which he stood perched so precariously, was all that the half-stunned consciousness of man could grasp; and, if he lost his grip on it, he fell back among the grotesque terrors and nightmare creatures of his own mind. Afterwards, when the strain had been finally released, in the physical exhaustion which followed, there was a collapse, in which one’s emotional nature was no longer under control.

‘We’re in the next dug-out, those who are left of us,’ Mr Clinton continued. ‘I am glad you came through all right, Bourne. You were in the last show, weren’t you? It seems to me the old Hun has brought up a lot more stuff, and doesn’t mean to shift, if he can help it. Anyway we should get a spell out of the line now. I don’t believe there are more than a hundred of us left.’

A quickening in his speech showed that the whiskey was beginning to play on frayed nerves: it had steadied Bourne for the time being. The flame of the candle gave one leap and went out. Mr Clinton switched on his torch, and shoved the water-bottle into the pocket of his raincoat.

‘Come on,’ he said, making for the steps, ‘you and I are two of the lucky ones, Bourne; we’ve come through without a scratch; and if our luck holds we’ll keep moving out of one bloody misery into another, until we break, see, until we break.’

Bourne felt a kind of suffocation in his throat: there was nothing weak or complaining in Mr Clinton’s voice, it was full of angry soreness. He switched off the light as he came to the Wilson canvas.

‘Don’t talk so bloody wet,’ Bourne said to him through the darkness. ‘You’ll never break.’

The officer gave no sign of having heard the sympathetic but indecorous rebuke. They moved along the battered trench silently. The sky flickered with the flash of guns, and an occasional star-shell flooded their path with light. As one fell slowly, Bourne saw a dead man in field grey propped up in a corner of a traverse; probably he had surrendered, wounded, and reached the trench only to die there. He looked indifferently at this piece of wreckage. The grey face was senseless and empty. As they turned the corner they were challenged by a sentry over the dug-out.