That was their secret. The secret of their boredom. Trying to kill them was like trying to shut up Liberals who would talk party politics in a non-political club had to be done, though! Otherwise the world was no place for...Oh, post-prandial naps!...Simple philosophy of the contest!...Forty minutes! And he glanced aside and upwards at the phosphorescent cockscomb! Within his mind something said that if he were only suspended up there...

He stepped once more on to the rifle-step and on to the bully-beef case. He elevated his head cautiously: grey desolation sloped down and away. FRRRrrr! A gentle purring sound!

He was automatically back, on the duckboard, his breakfast hurting his chest. He said:

'By jove! I got the fright of my life!' A laugh was called for: he managed it, his whole stomach shaking. And cold!

A head in a metal pudding-basin--a Suffolk type of blonde head, pushed itself from a withdrawn curtain of sacking in the gravel wall beside him, at his back. A voice said with concern:

'There ain't no beastly snipers, is there, sir? I did 'ope there would'n be henny beastly snipers 'ere. It gives such a beastly lot of extra trouble warning the men.'

Tietjens said it was a beastly skylark that almost walked into his mouth. The Acting Seargeant-Major said with enthusiasm that them 'ere skylarks could fair scare the guts out of you. He remembered a raid in the dark, crawling on 'is 'ands 'n knees wen 'e put 'is 'and on a skylark on its nest. Never left 'is nest till 'is 'and was on 'im! Then it went up and fair scared the wind out of 'im. Cor! Never would 'e fergit that!

With an air of carefully pulling parcels out of a carrier's cart he produced from the cavern behind the sacking two blinking assemblages of tubular khaki-clad limbs. They wavered to erectness, pink cheeses of faces yawning beside tall rifles and bayonets. The Sergeant said:

'Keep yer 'eds down as you go along. You never knows!'

Tietjens told the Lance-Corporal of that party of two that his confounded gas-mask nozzle was broken. Hadn't he seen that for himself? The dismembered object bobbed on the man's chest. He was to go and borrow another from another man and see the other drew a new one at once.

Tietjens' eyes were drawn aside and upwards. His knees were still weak. If he were levitated to the level of that thing he would not have to use his legs for support.

The elderly Sergeant went on with enthusiasm about skylarks. Wonderful the trust they showed in hus 'uman beens! Never left ther nesteses till you trod on them tho hall 'ell was rockin' around them...An appropriate skylark from above and before the parapet made its shrill and heartless noise heard. No doubt the skylark that Tietjens had frightened--that had frightened him.

Therd bin, the Sergeant went on still enthusiastically, pointing a hand in the direction of the noise, skylarks singin' on the mornin' of every straf 'e'd ever bin in! Won'erful trust in yumanity! Won'erful hinstinck set in the fethered brest by the Halmighty! For oo was goin' to 'it a skylark on a battlefield!

The solitary Man drooped beside his long, bayoneted rifle that was muddied from stock to bayonet attachment. Tietjens said mildly that he thought the Sergeant had got his natural history wrong. He must divide the males from the females. The females sat on the nest through obstinate attachment to their eggs; the males obstinately soared above the nests in order to pour out abuse at 'other male skylarks in the vicinity.

He said to himself that he must get the doctor to give him a bromide. A filthy state his nerves had got into unknown to himself. The agitation communicated to him by that bird was still turning his stomach round...

'Gilbert White of Selborne,' he said to the Sergeant, 'called the behaviour of the female STORGE: a good word for it.' But, as for trust in humanity, the Sergeant might take it that larks never gave us a thought. We were part of the landscape and if what destroyed their nests whilst they sat on them was a bit of H.E. shell or the coulter of a plough it was all one to them.

The Sergeant said to the re-joined Lance-Corporal whose box now hung correctly on his muddied chest:

'Now it's HAY post you gotter wait at!' They were to go along the trench and wait where another trench ran into it and there was a great A in whitewash on a bit of corrugated iron that was half-buried. 'You can tell a great HAY from a bull's foot as well as another, can't you, Corporal?' patiently.

Wen they Mills bombs come 'e was to send 'is Man into Hay Cumpny dugout fer a fatigue to bring 'em along 'ere, but Hay Cumpny could keep is little lot fer 'isself.

An if they Mills Bomb didn' come the Corporal'd better manufacture them on 'is own. An not make no mistakes!

The Lance-Corporal said 'Yes sargint, no sargint!' and the two went desultorily wavering along the duckboards, grey silhouettes against the wet bar of light, equilibrating themselves with hands on the walls of the trench.

'Ju 'eer what the orfcer said, Corporal,' the one said to the other. Wottever'll 'e say next! Skylarks not trust 'uman beens in battles! Cor!' The other grunted and, mournfully, the voices died out.

The cockscomb-shaped splash became of overwhelming interest momentarily to Tietjens; at the same time his mind began upon abstruse calculation of chances! Of his chances! A bad sign when the mind takes to doing that.