Greenmantle - John Buchan

seemed to be a kind of cup between the spurs. Just before him was a little ruined
building, with the sky seen through its rafters, for the smouldering ruin on the
right gave a certain light. He wondered if the Russian firing-line lay there.
Just then he heard voices—smothered voices—not a yard away and
apparently below the ground. He instantly jumped to what this must mean. It
was a Turkish trench—a communication trench. Peter didn't know much about
modern warfare, but he had read in the papers, or heard from me, enough to
make him draw the right moral. The fresh dead pointed to the same conclusion.
What he had got through were the Turkish support trenches, not their firing-line.
That was still before him.
He didn't despair, for the rebound from panic had made him extra
courageous. He crawled forward, an inch at a time, taking no sort of risk, and
presently found himself looking at the parados of a trench. Then he lay quiet to
think out the next step.
The shelling had stopped, and there was that queer kind of peace which falls
sometimes on two armies not a quarter of a mile distant. Peter said he could hear
nothing but the far-off sighing of the wind. There seemed to be no movement of
any kind in the trench before him, which ran through the ruined building. The
light of the burning was dying, and he could just make out the mound of earth a
yard in front. He began to feel hungry, and got out his packet of food and had a
swig at the brandy flask. That comforted him, and he felt a master of his fate
again. But the next step was not so easy. He must find out what lay behind that
mound of earth.
Suddenly a curious sound fell on his ears. It was so faint that at first he
doubted the evidence of his senses. Then as the wind fell it came louder. It was
exactly like some hollow piece of metal being struck by a stick, musical and
oddly resonant.
He concluded it was the wind blowing a branch of a tree against an old boiler
in the ruin before him. The trouble was that there was scarcely enough wind now
for that in this sheltered cup.
But as he listened he caught the note again. It was a bell, a fallen bell, and the
place before him must have been a chapel. He remembered that an Armenian
monastery had been marked on the big map, and he guessed it was the burned