for a day,--perhaps not for an hour, did the big collie forget the
home of his babyhood or those he had delighted to worship, there. And
the look of sadness in his dark eyes became a settled aspect. Yet,
here, there was much to interest and to excite him. And he grew to look
forward with pleasure to his daily lessons.

At the end of three months, he was shipped to France. There his
seemingly aimless studies at the training camp were put to active use.

* * * * *

At the foot of the long Flanders hill-slope the "Here-We-Come"
Regiment, of mixed American and French infantry, held a
caterpillar-shaped line of trenches.

To the right, a few hundred yards away, was posted a Lancashire
regiment, supported by a battalion from Cornwall. On the left were two
French regiments. In front, facing the hill-slope and not a half-mile
distant, was the geometric arrangement of sandbags that marked the
contour of the German first-line trenches.

The hill behind them, the boches in front of them, French and British
troops on either side of them--the Here-We-Comes were helping to defend
what was known as a "quiet" sector. Behind the hill, and on loftier
heights far to the rear, the Allied artillery was posted. Somewhere in
the same general locality lay a division of British reserves.

It is almost a waste of words to have described thus the surroundings
of the Here-We-Comes. For, with no warning at all, those entire
surroundings were about to be changed.

Ludendorff and his little playmates were just then engaged in the
congenial sport of delivering unexpected blows at various successive
points of the Allied line, in an effort to find some spot that was soft
enough to cave in under the impact and let through a horde of gray-clad
Huns. And though none of the defenders knew it, this "quiet" sector had
been chosen for such a minor blow.

The men in higher command, back there behind the hill crest, had a
belated inkling, though, of a proposed attack on the lightly defended
front trenches. For the Allied airplanes which drifted in the upper
heavens like a scattered handful of dragon-flies were not drifting
there aimlessly. They were the eyes of the snakelike columns that
crawled so blindly on the scarred brown surface of the earth. And those
"eyes" had discerned the massing of a force behind the German line had
discerned and had duly reported it.

The attack might come in a day. It might not come in a week. B