chine-gun began. The brutes were playing into
the melee, regardless of their own men, in a frantic endeavour to stop
the Reedshires' rush, and as A Company recoiled before that stream of
bullets, Dennis drew his revolver.

Already one of the Prussian battalions had swarmed over into their own
trench, paying no heed to the solitary figure in the black shadow as
they passed him, and, marking the position of the gun, Dennis scrambled
up in their wake with the agility of a cat, and darted into the gun
emplacement single-handed, just as young Wetherby and Hawke saw him and
gave a shout of recognition.

The Germans were chained to the piece, and as he shot the last man of
the gun crew, his brother officer overtook him.

At his heels A Company had arrived with a heartening roar, and jumped
down on to the crowded mass in the trench below them, a perfect forest
of arms going up as the demoralised runaways bellowed for mercy.

"Bravo, Hawke! Go it, boys!" shouted Dennis, almost overturning
Wetherby.

"My hat!" exclaimed the boy, as they gripped each other to save falling
into the tightly packed trench below them, "that was no end of a stunt
of yours. If we hadn't shifted forward we should have been killed to a
man. Hadn't left our position five minutes before their shells found
us!"

"And I never knew you'd moved," said Dennis. "Look at those chaps
bolting into that dug-out there! Give 'em a couple of bombs!"

Young Wetherby hurled two Mills grenades into an opening in the wall of
the German parados, and the double explosion was followed by a chorus of
piercing screams. As for the trench, it was piled up with bodies five
and six deep, for the Prussians were sturdy men and fought like wild
cats.

But already the Highland battalion on the Reedshires' left had come up.
Other battalions away to the east were making good, and the brigade was
carrying all before it.

"Forward!" rang the whistles, and, leaving the supports to consolidate,
the leading battalions cleared the parados and pushed on.

It was a wild flounder over the sodden ground, three hundred yards of
it, with shell-holes where the rain took you up to your armpits, but the
Reedshires had tasted the glories of conquest, and there was no holding
them back, if, indeed, anyone had wished to do so.

"Next stop, Berlin!" yelled Harry Hawke, tripping up as the words left
his mouth, and sliding twice his own length to the edge of a crump-hole,
into which another inch