ion, even as a traveller learns that he is nearing the sea. For
they heard the crackle of musketry following upon the altercation of
guns. All this passed as in a dream, and it seemed little more than a
few minutes before Sergeant Stokes, having passed through a curtain of
shrapnel, had his platoon extended in some shallow support trenches to
which the remnants of the regiment whom they were called upon to stiffen
had fallen back. It was a critical moment: our first trenches were in
the hands of the enemy, and the whole line was sagging under the impact
of the German hordes. Somehow that trench had to be recaptured--to be
recaptured before the Germans had converted the parados into an
invulnerable parapet and had constructed a nest of machine-guns to sweep
with a crossfire the right and left flanks, where our line curved in
like a gigantic horse-shoe. Of all this Sergeant Stokes knew as little
as is usually given to one platoon to know on a front of eight miles.

As dawn broke and the stars paled, the word came down the line, and, in
a series of short rushes, stooping somewhat in the attitude of a man who
is climbing a very steep hill, they moved forward in extended order
about eight or ten paces apart carrying their rifles with bayonets
fixed. A hail-storm of lead greeted them, and all around him Sergeant
Stokes saw men falling, and as they fell lying in strange attitudes and
uncouth--some stumbling (he had seen a hare shot in the back dragging
its legs in just that way), others lying on their faces and clutching
the earth convulsively as they drummed with their feet, and some very
still. Overhead there was a sobbing and whimpering in the air. A little
ahead to the left of him a machine-gun was tap-tapping like a telegraph
instrument, and as it traversed the field of their advance the men went
down in swathes.

If only he could get to that gun! On the right a low hedge ran at right
angles to the German trench, and making for it he took such little cover
as it afforded, and ran forward as he had never run before, not even on
that night of baneful memory. His heart was thumping violently, there
was a prodigious "stitch" in his side; and something warm was trickling
down his forehead into his eyes and half blinding him, while in his ears
the bullets buzzed like a swarm of infuriated bees. The next moment he
was up against a little knot of grey-coated figures with toy-like
helmets, he heard a word that sounded like "Himmel