He had a good deal more to say in the same strain—with especially biting criticism on the “artillery barrage” and the red-faced big drummer who played lead in it—during the rest of the practice and at the end of it when they lay in their “final objective” and rested, smoking and cooling off with the top buttons of tunics undone, while the officers gathered round the C.O. and listened to criticism and made notes in their books. “I’ll admit,” he said, “they might plan out the trenches here the same as the ones we’re to attack from. It’s this rot o’ layin’ out the Fritz trenches gets me. An’ this attack—it’s about as like a real attack as my gasper’s like a machine-gun. Huh! Wi’ one bloke clockin’ you on a stop-watch, an’ another countin’ the paces between the trenches—Boche trenches a mile behind their front line, mind you—an’ another whackin’ a big drum like a kid in a nursery. An’ all this ‘Go steady here, this is a sharp rise,’ or ’hurry this bit, ’cos most likely it’ll be open to enfiladin’ machine-gun fire,’ or ‘this here’s the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements.’ Huh! Plunky rot I calls it.” The others heard him in silence or with mild chaffing replies. Ratty was new to this planned-attack game, of course, but since he had been out and taken his whack of the early days, had been wounded, and home, and only lately had come out again, he was entitled to a certain amount of excusing. Johnny summed it up for them. “We’ve moved a bit since the Noove Chapelle days, you know,” he said. “You didn’t have no little lot like this then, did you?” jerking his head at the bristling line of their machine-guns. “An’ you didn’t have creepin’ barrages, an’ more shells than you could fire, eh? Used to lose seventy an’ eighty per cent. o’ the battalion’s strength goin’ over the bags them days, didn’t you? Well, we’ve changed that a bit, thank Gawd. You’ll see the differ presently.” Later on Ratty had to admit a considerable “differ” and a great improvement on old ways. He and his company moved up towards the front leisurely and certainly, without haste and without confusion, having the orders detailed overnight for the next day’s march, finding meals cooked and served regularly, travelling by roads obviously known and “detailed” for them, coming at night to camp or billet places left vacant for them immediately before, finding everything planned and prepared, foreseen and provided for. But, although he admitted all this, he stuck to his belief that beyond the front line this carefully-planned moving must cease abruptly. “It’ll be the same plunky old scramble an’ scrap, I’ll bet,” he said. “We’ll see then if all the Fritz trenches is just where we’ve fixed ’em, an’ if we runs to a regular time-table and follows the laid-down route an’ first-turn-to-the-right-an’-mind-the-step-performance we’ve been practisin’.”