Johnny looked and had to laugh. The man with the big drum was lugging it off at the double away from the kilted line, and strung out to either side of him there raced a scattered line of men armed with sticks and biscuit-tins and empty cans. Ratty and his companions were clothed in full fighting kit and equipment, and bore boxes of very real ammunition. In the “trenches” ahead of them, or moving over the open, were other men similarly equipped; rolling back to them came a clash and clatter, a dull prolonged _boom-boom-boom_. In every detail, so far as the men were concerned, an attack was in full swing; but there was no yell and crash of falling shells, no piping whistle and sharp crack of bullets, no deafening, shaking thunder of artillery (except that steady _boom-boom_), no shell-scorched strip of battered ground. The warm sun shone on trim green fields, on long twisting lines of flags and tapes strung on sticks, on ranks of perspiring men in khaki with rifles and bombs and machine-guns and ammunition and stretchers and all the other accoutrements of battle. There were no signs of death or wounds, none of the horror of war, because this was merely a “practice attack,” a full-dress rehearsal of the real thing, full ten miles behind the front. The trenches were marked out by flags and tapes, the artillery barrage was a line of men hammering biscuit-tins and a big drum, and waving fluttering white flags. The kilts came to a halt fifty paces short of them, and a moment later, the “barrage” sprinted off ahead one or two score yards, halted, and fell to banging and battering tins and drum and waving flags, while the kilts solemnly moved on after them, to halt again at their measured distance until the next “lift” of the “barrage.” It looked sheer child’s play, a silly elaborate game; and yet there was no sign of laughter or play about the men taking part in it—except on the part of Ratty Travers. Ratty was openly scornful. “Ready there,” said a sergeant rising and pocketing the notebook he had been studying. “We’ve only five minutes in this trench. And remember you move half-right when you leave here, an’ the next line o’ flags is the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements along the edge.” Ratty chuckled sardonically. “I ’ope that in the real thing them machine-guns won’t ‘ave nothing to say to us movin’ half-right across their front,” he said. “They’ve been strafed out wi’ the guns,” said Johnny simply, “an’ the Jocks ’as mopped up any that’s left. We was told that yesterday.” “I dare say,” retorted Ratty. “An’ I hopes the Huns ’ave been careful instructed in the same. It ’ud be a pity if they went an’ did anything to spoil all the plans. But they wouldn’t do that. Oh, no, of course not—I _don’t_ think!”