ty parapet, whistled and droned and hissed
across the open. And then, suddenly, the assault was launched from all
along the German line.

At the same instant a shell struck the wall of the Forward Officer's
station, burst with a terrific crash, swept three parts of the
remaining wall away in a cloud of shrieking splinters and swirling dust
of brick and plaster, and threw the Forward Officer headlong half a
dozen yards. By some miracle he was untouched. His first thought was
for the telephone--the connecting link with his guns. He scrambled
over the debris to the dug-out or shelter-pit behind his corner and
found telephonist and telephone intact. He dropped on hands and knees
and crawled over the rubble and out beyond the end of the wall, for the
cloud of smoke and plaster and brick-dust still hung heavily about the
ruin. Here, in the open as he was, the air sang like tense
harp-strings to the passage of innumerable bullets, the ground about
his feet danced to their drumming, flicked and spat little spurts of
mud all over him.

But the Forward Officer paid little heed to these things. For one
moment his gaze was riveted horror-stricken on the scene of the fight;
the next he was on his feet, heedless of the singing bullets, heedless
of the roar and crash of another shell that hit the ground and flung a
cart-load of earth and mud whizzing and thumping about him, heedless of
everything except the need to get quickly to the telephone.

'Tell the Battery, Germans advancing--heavy attack on our front!' he
panted to the telephonist, jumped across to his corner, and heaved
himself up into place. The dust had cleared now, so that he could see.
And what he could see made him catch his breath. An almost solid line
of Germans were clear of their trenches and pushing rapidly across the
open on the weak centre. And the Battery's shells were falling behind
the German line and still on their trenches. Swiftly the Forward
Officer began to reel off his corrections of angles and range, and as
the telephonist passed them on gun after gun began to pitch its shells
on the advancing line.

The British rifles were busy too, and their fire rose in one continuous
roar. But the fire was weakest from the thin centre line, the spot
where the attack was heaviest. The guns were in full play again, and
the shells were blasting quick gaps out of the advancing line. But the
line came on. The rifles beat upon it, and a machine-gun on th