Dennis yelled: "Bob, you juggins, do you want to do the lot of us in?"

"Oh, it's you, is it?" cried his brother, sliding through the opening
with a sergeant and a couple of bombers. "I might have known you'd be
mixed up in it somehow. We heard some German jabbering and chanced our
arm."

"And a lucky thing for us you did," said Dennis, pointing to the
hideously bespattered grey-green uniforms that littered the earth heap.
Only one of the nine men was moving, and after a convulsive opening and
shutting of his hands the movement ceased altogether. "How is it going
up above?"

"Top-hole, so far," said the Captain. "At least, as far as our battalion
is concerned, though there seems to be a bit of a check among those
chaps on our left. Nobody else down here? Very well; this is the
quickest way out, and every minute is an hour. We've got their
first-line trench, or all that was left of it." And they scrambled once
more up the land slide into the open-air.

CHAPTER XVI

The Silencing of the Guns

The German guns were flinging a terrific barrage fire behind us in a
vain attempt to prevent our reserves coming up, and Dennis found that
the spot at which they had emerged was close to the entrance of the
village, if one could dignify those shapeless heaps of brick and mortar
by such a name.

Oddly enough, above his head towered a gilded Calvary, untouched by our
previous bombardment or the rain of bullets that sang through the air.

He found the rest of his company lining a low bank on which flowers were
growing, and replying to some hot fire from the other side of the
street, at the entrance to which a company of the kilted battalion which
had gone over on their left was re-forming after suffering severely.

A good score of them were lying face downwards between what had been the
first houses of the village, and he recognised the regiment by the
green-and-yellow tartan.

There was no need to ask the reason of their pause, for eye and ear told
him that machine-guns were trained along the street, into which no man
might pass and live.

Somebody gave a tug at the skirt of Dennis's tunic as he knelt on one
knee, looking sharply about him, and he saw that it was Private Harry
Hawke, lying prone on his stomach, in the act of recharging his
magazine, and there was an odd grin on the little Cockney's face.

"I know what you're thinkin' abart, sir," he said. "Them guns is yonder
in the church. I got 'em set the mom