oming Kaiser made up his mind that he would break through
our lines, and get to Calais. Yes, it was a touch and go with us.
Fancy four to one, and they had all the advantage in big guns and
ammunition. You think _those_ big guns? Wait till you have heard Jack
Johnson and Black Maria. Talk about hell! Hell was never as bad as
the battle of Wipers. I thought we were licked once. I was in the
part where our line was the thinnest, and we saw 'em coming towards us
in crowds; there seemed to be millions of 'em; we had to rake out every
cook and bottle-washer on the show. Lots of our men were fresh to the
job, too, and had never smelt powder, or felt the touch of steel. But,
by gosh, we let 'em know! Four to one, my boy, and we licked 'em, in
spite of their big guns and their boasting. Aren't you proud of being
a British Tommy?"

Tom listened with wide, staring eyes and compressed lips. There within
a mile or two of the battle line he could picture all of which the
sergeant spoke. As he looked he could see the brown line of earth away
in the distance, and could discern too, here and there, dotted along
this brown line, clouds of black smoke. All around him our guns were
booming, while the distant sounds of the German guns reached him.

"Ay, it's a bit unhealthy," went on the sergeant, "but you will get
used to it after a bit. There, hear that?"

Tom listened and heard the screaming of a shell in the air; the note it
made was at first low, but it rose higher and higher and then dropped
again.

"When the note gets to about B flat," said the sergeant, "you may know
it's soon going to fall, and as soon as it has touched the ground the
shell bursts and tears a big hole up."

"Are many killed?" asked Tom.

"Ay, there's a good lot of casualties every day, but not so much as
there was at the second battle of Wipers. That was fair terrible. You
see, the Germans could not drive us back nor break our lines. That was
why they started bombarding the city. I was here and saw it. Man, you
should have heard the women screaming, and seen the people flying for
their lives. Whole streets of houses were burning, and all the time
shells were falling and bursting. How many people were killed here God
only knows, but there must have been hundreds of women and children.
But what did those dirty swine of Germans care! They could not break
our lines, and they had lost a hundred and fifty thousand men, so they
turned their