The first night I had night sentry duty with Bruno. It was pitch black, the only lights being the occasional red flare that would shoot up. It was silent as well, eerily silent. We could hear rats in dead man's land, squeaking and disappearing into the darkness. We would take turns sleeping, every hour or so we would switch up and give the other man a rest.
At one point, it was just me, Bruno was sleeping clutching his rifle in his arms, holding it as if he were holding a lover. I peaked over the small outcrop in the trench that we were in. Pitch blackness, my eyes tried to adjust to the darkness, but there were no light sources to draw from, it was cloudy so I didn't even get the light from the moon. Just when I was about to sit back down in my hole, I heard a crack in the distance, not the crack of an artillery shell, but that of a rifle.
I could see a faint flash of light as well, some hundred meters away, in the O.R trench. "What the hell was that". Bruno whispered as he quickly woke up from the sound, he scrambled up and rested his rifle pointing towards the O.R lines with mine. "Some idiot is shooting over there, not at us, wait for another flash" I responded as I looked through the iron sights of my R60.
Training it to where I saw the flash previously, Bruno did the same. "Range the rifle for a hundred meters, it was about one o'clock" I added. Bruno moved the notch back from fifty meters to a hundred meters, and looked into his sights.
A couple excruciating silent minutes followed. Then suddenly, another crack, and another flash. Me and Bruno both instinctively fired our rifle at the source of the light. We did not wait for a response, after firing we quickly got our heads down and moved ten or so meters down the line, to another sentry post, as we were told to do by Marco if we fired.
"You think we got em" I said as I leaned my head back to rest on the wall of the trench. "Dunno about you, but I definitely hit him" Bruno said as I could barely make out a grin on his face in the darkness.
"Definitely?" "Yes definitely" "How in all things holy do you definitely know if you hit em". "I guess you'll know when you finally get some". "Ah bullshit. It's your turn on watch, try not to get shot." I said as I closed my eyes.
The night continued, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. Eventually, we were relieved some time before morning. That was our first day at the firing lines. While in the firing line, one had to always be careful to keep a low profile, even if you thought you were out of sight, there was always a threat of a sniper, carefully waiting until you made one mistake.
The second day was less worrisome than the night was, as there were never any raiding parties during the day, and any attack would be an all out assault, which would come after an artillery strike, so all we had to worry about was artillery.
But there was no artillery fire on the second day. It was a rather boring day, but the nerves were high enough that we could not relax. Every time I got close to relaxing, some sniper fire would go right over my head, or a single artillery shell would land close.
As if they were specifically targeting me, to make sure I alone did not get any rest on the line. The little amount of sleep that we got only pushed our nerves more. We were tired or too on edge to make any.
Even Marcos appearance started to get sloppy, it was the first time any of us had seen it, but just some days on the line had reduced the one clean man, into something of a mess, with dirt on his face, and mud caked into his clothes, though he seemed to always be cleaning his revolver, I guess one part of him was clean. The rest of us were also a mess, but that was normal for soldiers in our situation.