October 10, 1918 
LAND d? WATER 
13 
has a good deal to do with my story. It was built up of 
breast-works, and the intervening sectors were not straight 
— in places they curved so that you could not see the whole 
length of them. There was the usual duck-board floor, 
covered with springy wire-netting. Each post was in charge 
of a corporal and a section ; the intervening stretches of 
trench were not manned, but were visited irregularly during 
the night by a ' duck-board patrol.' At one point the trench 
crossed a shallow stream, which ran at an angle to it, and 
this gap in the parapet was filled up with 'gooseberries' 
— big balls of barbed wire — you know what I mean. The 
. German trenches were about 150 yards away. The inter- 
vening landscape was desolate beyond belief — the face of 
the earth pitted with shell-holes' as though the earth had 
been attacked with small-pox, and not a sign of life any- 
where. Behind our support trenches were the skeletons of 
ruined farms, and here and there a mound of earth with a 
white cross. Just before 'stand-to,' a ration-party of five 
men used to come up the fire-trench carrying 'dixies' of 
hot tea, and so on, for the men at the posts. Well, just 
before dawn, as I was visiting Number 2 post, the corporal 
in charge said to me 'Have you seen the Australian, sir?' 
V and then, seeing my look of astonishment, he added : 'Some 
of the men say they saw an Australian walking up the duck- 
boards.' ' Then some of the men have been talking through 
their hat,' I replied. 'There's no Australian within ten miles 
of here.' No more there wasn't, except the eight hundred 
dead ones on the other side of the parapet, who didn't count. 
'That's what I tells them, sir,' replied the corporal, taking 
his cue from me. 
" Half an hour later I encountered four men carrying a 
man on a stretcher down the communication-trench. ' What's 
this?' I said. 'Number five of the ration-party, sir,' they 
answered. 'We found him lying on his face on the duck- 
boards. We think he must have had a fit.' They carried him 
to the battalion aid-post. The M.O.* took one glance at 
him. 'He's dead.' he said. 'But the body's still warm.' 
He examined it, but could find no trace of a wound ; not 
even a. bruise. There was no froth on the lips, but the face 
was very white. 'Hum!' said the M.O., 'if he's had a fit, 
I don't know the name of it. Heart disease, I suppose.' 
A battalion M.O. hasn't much time for post-mortem work, 
as you know, and the coroner's writ doesn't run in the 
trenches ; a M.O.'s too busy with the living to think of the 
dead. The body was handed over to a burying-party, after 
the man's identity-disc and pay-book had been removed, 
and we thought no more about it. 
"The third night passed off as usual, though it was, if 
anything, blacker than before. You could have cut the 
darkness with a knife. The men of Number i platoon were 
posted, visited, and relieved— the usual routine. When 
dawn broke, the rum ration was served out. I had seen 
the ration-party go up about half an hour before — five in 
all ; the fifth man's place had been taken by another, and 
he was already forgotten. You've no time to remember 
out there. Is it not so ? . . . As I was passing Number i 
post I heard the corporal arguing with the men. 'I tell you 
there ain't no blinking Australian,' he was saying. 'They're 
as dead as Australian mutton.' The men must have been 
'seeing things' again, and I felt a bit shirty about it. 1 was 
about to intervene and tell them not to make fools of them- 
selves when the platoon commander, a chap named 
Wrottesley, came up to me with his platoon- sergeant. He 
asked me to follow him along the trench, and when we were 
out of hearing of the men he said to me, in a low voice : 
' I've just found something, sir,' and as we turned the corner 
of a traverse he pointed to the duck-boards ahead of us. 
A man lay face downwards. His helmet had slipped and 
covered the back of his head like a great toadstool ; his 
hands were convulsed and his legs spread out ; an over- 
turned dixie lay by his side. I went up to him and turned 
him over. He was dead. 'He's Number 5 of the ration- 
party, sir,' said the platoon -sergeant. 'And he ain't got a 
scratch.' The dead man was not pleasant to look at ; his 
lips were blanched, his face ashen-grey, and his mouth dis- 
tended in a mirthless grin, while his clenched hands were full 
of mud. But what struck me most was the look of horror on 
his face. I had the body sent down to the aid-post, and I 
paraded the ration-party. None of them had heard or seen 
anything. They were pretty scared, especially the fourth 
man. I then ordered Wrottesley to muster his platoon. 
I questioned them closely, but none of them couM tell me 
anything Except one man, who said he'd seen 'the Aus- 
tralian.' ' I seen him, sir,' he said, 'but I wass never hear 
him— his feet wass never make a sound. The likes of them 
never do.' I turned on him pretty sharply, and asked him 
• Medical Officer. 
what the hell he meant by talking like that. It was a 
mistake, for after that 1 couldn't get a word out of them. 
"1 went to the aid-post. The M.O. seemed puzzled. He 
had stripped the body naked : it lay there in the dug-out 
gle'aming in the cold' grey dawn. 'He may have died of 
shock,' he said, ' but it looks to me more like a case of internal 
hemorrhage, or angina pectoris.' 
"I couldn't make it out. One's heard of murder in the 
trenches, of course — a private with a grudge against a ser- 
geant, a quarrel of two men about a girl in billets, a homicidal 
objection to another man's voice, or his laugh or his squint. 
It's very easy to lose one's sense of proportion out there 1 
But this case was too damned impersonal to admit of that 
sort of explanation. No one knew beforehand who would 
be Number 5 in the ration-party, and it was the fifth man 
who had been 'outed' each time. 1 guessed there wouldn't 
be much competition in that ration-party the ne.xt night 
for fifth- place, and that Number 5 would tread pretty close 
on the heels of Number 4. Of course, they were generally 
strung over about fifty yards, each man ten yards behind 
the other — to distribute the risks from a ; Minnie.'* 
" D'you know the symptoms of an epidemic of cold feet ? 
I mean when your company's got the wind up. Unpleasant, 
isn't it ?— and very catching. The men, instead of sleeping 
in their dug-outs, hung about all day in little clusters, talking 
to one another, and suddenly drying-up as 1 came along. 
I knew what they were talking about. You see I'm half a 
Welshman myself — enough of one to understand their tempera- 
ment but not enough of one to share it, for which I'm not 
sorry. They've got superstition in the marrow of their bones. 
Their very hymns are enough to make your flesh creep — they 
are all in the minor key. They used to sing them in the 
trenches, weird dirges like '0 fryniau Caersalem, ceir gweled' 
— or something like that. Sang them damned well, too. But 
there was mighty little singing that day. I didn't like the 
look of things at all. 
"As the day drew to its close, there came a change in the 
weather. The wind died down, the sky turned to the colour 
of dirty wool, and the air grew very cold. It looked as if it 
might 'snow. There was a faint moon. I gave Wrottesley 
orders to double the patrols, and determined to keep a sharp 
look-out myself. After I had made these dispositions, I 
went to Battalion Headquarters to report them to the CO. 
As I was coming away, the M.O., a quizzical devil with a 
bullet head and hard" as iron — he'd been a famous Welsh 
three-quarter in his day — said to me : 'I say, Meredith ; 
do any of your men carry hat-pins ? ' > 'Lord, no,' I replied. 
'Nor powder-puffs. And" they don't use hair-curlers. What 
are you getting at?' 'I'll tell you to-morrow,' he said, 
'but' it's my opinion there's something in the Australian 
theory, after all.' I looked at him. 'Have you got the 
wind up, too, doctor?' I said. '1 didn't know you believed 
in ghosts.' ' I don't,' he retorted, 'but! do believe in devils.' 
And with that he turned away. I thought him a damned 
fool, and said so. 
"As the night wore on I went round the whole front of 
800 yards twice, but saw nothing. I carried my revolver 
in my hand ready to fire 'double action,' and I had my 
runner and my batman with me. The men were very jumpy, 
and I was challenged every time by every man I met, let 
alone the sentries. I made up my mind to go round a third 
time a few minutes before the ration-party came up. 
As I pulled aside the vermorel blanket of my dug-out 
and looked up at the sky, which was now obscured" 
by clouds, something soft as lamb's wool, but very cold, 
gently touched my cheek. It was a snow-flake. In a few 
seconds it was followed by others. Soon everything in front 
of one was veiled by a speckled curtain like a moving screen 
of muslin. The incessant weaving of this great white cur- 
tain, a warp without a woof, woven upon a loom without a 
shuttle, affected me strangely. Motion without sound is 
always uncanny, and the snowflakes fell like shadows, and 
not less noiselessly. You know how snow seems to numb 
one's brain ? It's like an ansesthetic. 
"I proposed to vary my itinerary for my third round 
— deliberately and with malice aforethought. Hitherto I 
had always gone my rounds from right to left, beginning 
with Number i post. This time I determined to reverse 
the order. I had visited Number 4 and Number 3, and 
had just reached Number 2 and been challenged when the 
corporal in charge suddenly let his rifle fall with a clatter 
on to the duck-board. His teeth were chattering and his 
hands shook as though he were going to have a fit. ' Christ 
he stuttered, looking down" the trench. ' It's the Australian ! ' 
I could see nothing, but at that very moment I felt the 
duck-boards give under my feet; "as though a movement 
* Minnenwerfers (German trench mortars). 
