noon
When this happened , the living had no other choice than to ape the dead , lest the least movement , detected by eyes that peered without rest through loopholes in the sandbag parapets , invite a bullet 's blow . Now it was midnight , and lights were flaring less frequently , even as rifle-fire had grown more intermittent ... as if many waters might quench out hate in the heart of man ! For it was raining hard -- a dogged , dreary downpour drilling through a heavy atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and inexorable incubus ; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter of a weary , sullen drum , dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering of machine-guns remote in the northward , dominating even a dull thunder of cannonading somewhere down the far horizon ; lowering a vast and shimmering curtain of slender lances , steel-bright , close-ranked , between the trenches and over all that weary land . Thus had it rained since noon , and thus -- for want of any hint of slackening -- it might rain for another twelve hours , or eighteen , or twenty-four ... . The star-rocket , whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool , paled and winked out in mid-air , and for several minutes unbroken darkness obtained while , on hands and knees , the man crept on toward that gap in the British barbed-wire entanglements which he had marked down ere daylight waned , shaping a tolerably straight course despite frequent detours to avoid the unspeakable . Only once was his progress interrupted -- when straining senses apprised him that a British patrol was taking advantage of the false truce to reconnoitre toward the enemy lines , its approach betrayed by a nearing _ squash _ of furtive feet in the boggy earth , the rasp of constrained respiration , a muttered curse when someone slipped and narrowly escaped a fall , the edged hiss of an officer 's whisper reprimanding the offender . Incontinently he who crawled dropped flat to the greasy mud and lay moveless .