"’Ware Jack Johnson!" cried Captain Adams, and the men crouched in the trenches, holding their breath. The first shell fell some distance behind the lines. They heard a terrific crash, and saw a column of thick smoke. The second shell, about a minute after the first, fell far too short, plunging into the ground just in front of the German trenches, and bespattering them with earth. The third exploded in the pond between the lines, and sent a wave into the German trench at the side. During the next half hour the ground in front of the pond between the opposing forces was pitted with holes made by the heavy shells. "There’s something wrong with the range-finding or the charges," remarked Harry. "Lucky for us," said Kenneth, brushing from his coat some dust cast up by one of the shells. "The smell is bad enough." After half an hour the shelling ceased, and the men wondered what purpose the Germans could have had in such an apparently motiveless bombardment. Captain Adams suspected that something was going on in the German lines, and remembering the success of Kenneth and Ginger in discovering the sniper, he decided to send them out that night as a listening patrol. Harry begged to be allowed to go with them. "Very well," said the captain. "If you’re successful we’ll try a whole section another time. It’s a ticklish job, you understand. You’ll crawl over to the German trenches, and listen. You know German, Amory, I believe. You’ll do the listening, then; you others keep on the watch. Don’t lose your way. I’ll take care that the men here don’t fire on you as you come back; but if you stray too far to right or left you may find yourselves in hot water." "You’ve no special instructions, sir?" asked Kenneth. "No: you must work out the details yourselves. You’re not puppets on the end of a string." "Nor yet monkeys on a stick," Ginger murmured when the captain had gone. "What did Capting mean by that?" "He meant that we’re not machine made, as the Germans are, by all accounts," replied Harry. "I say, I’m jolly glad he let me go too: I’m getting quite fat with doing nothing." They talked over their plans together. Obviously the safest direction in which to approach the enemy was towards the large pond. This was an irregular oval in shape, and the Germans had not closely followed its curve in cutting their trenches, for, if they had done so, it would have exposed them to enfilading fire from the British. They had carried their advanced trench close up to the border of the pond on each side, then run communicating trenches at right angles from front to rear, and there dug a straight trench along the breadth of the pond, about a hundred yards in the rear of their first alignment. The wire entanglements in front of the pond, facing the British, were not so elaborate as on the rest of their line, from which the inference was that the water was too deep to be waded.