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Sooner or later my parents would be bound to have the telegram announcing my death; the war had only to go on long enough. Already I had exhausted my quota of chances of survival. My mother and father, particularly my mother … There was no time and this was no place in which to pursue such thoughts. The soft, caressing mist, the great pall of blackness which had now begun to grey with the approaching dawn, was matched by the silence turning to the pulsating throb of the engines along the front. I watched the minute hand motionless, creeping, rushing headlong to zero hour.
The two men who were to be with me as runners, the Sweeting brothers, and I lifted our eyes from our hatches to where behind us were the heights of the plateau from which we had descended to the Luce. The great wall of fog was suddenly illuminated and given shape by the stabbing white flashes of our guns. For a time it was soundless like summer lightning; then the shrill, demented screaming air above and the roar of the barrage. We turned to our front; the tanks had gone and we were three men alone.
We hurried, the fast, loping Ypres walk, but on firm ground, not duckboards. It was almost a run, as if we were going somewhere. We were not; we were only getting away, as far as we could and as fast, from the ground on which we stood. I had an idea that we could somehow escape the zone of the enemy's counter-barrage. What a time he took! What had happened to him?
Then it came. It was exhilarating, like my walk along the trench top at Messines. Two of us went on. “My brother!” he screamed above the din. “Come on!” What the hell had happened to him? Lost in the fog? Stopped to do up his bootlaces? His disappearance was complete.