run
that morning. Fourteen-inch shells, seventeen-inch shells, and
thousands of smaller missiles, ploughed through and rained over the
line, and many a ponderous fellow found its way to the deep dug-outs
and shelters which had long ago been prepared for such an eventuality.
Smoke hid the sky on this 19th of February and the two days following,
the smoke of bursting shells plunging upon the French positions, while
the cannon which threw those shells were still hidden by the tangled
woods clothing the ground occupied by the enemy. Yet, if the gallant
_poilus_ manning the French trenches were not in evidence, if, indeed,
life was being stamped out of a number of them by this terrific
avalanche of bursting metal, they were yet for all that not entirely
unsupported, for already those guns behind the advance lines of our
ally were thundering, while, overhead, fleets of aeroplanes were
picking up the positions of German batteries, and were signalling back
to those who had sent them.

Crouching in the depths of a dug-out, some thirty feet below the
surface, a dug-out which shook and quivered as shells rained above it,
Henri's comrades of the platoon smoked grimly, while that young fellow
himself, once a Paris elegant, crouched in what was left of a
fire-trench, now a mere shattered pit--and peered somewhat anxiously
towards the open.

"And you are there still, mon ami?" called the Sergeant, when there was
a five minutes' lull in the firing, "you find it warm perhaps, mon
Henri? But you will hold to your post firmly--yes, you will do that,
as will all our comrades."

His big, healthy, bearded face looked out from the narrow entrance of
the stairs which gave access to the dug-out, and for a while he
grinned, a friendly, encouraging grin, at our hero. Then those heavy
thuds in the distance, and a loud burst close at hand, sent him diving
back to shelter, leaving Henri alone, a pipe now gripped between his
teeth, his rifle slung over one shoulder, standing his ground, gazing
before him, waiting for the first sign of an enemy attack.

"It will come soon, yes, very soon," the Sergeant said, when another
lull in the firing arrived. "They will go on blazing away, throwing
tons of metal at us, till they think they have blotted us out of
existence, and then--then you will see they will swarm to the attack,
these Germans."

Yet that did not prove to be the case, for, as a matter of fact, the
Germans, profiting by the lesson t