But it was as they approached the fighting zone, and finally when they found themselves installed in a support trench on the morning of the Push that Ratty came to understand the full difference between old battles and this new style. For days on end he heard such gun-fire as he had never dreamed of, heard it continue without ceasing or slackening day and night. By day he saw the distant German ground veiled in a drifting fog-bank of smoke, saw it by night starred with winking and spurting gusts of flame from our high-explosives. He walked or lay on a ground that quivered and trembled under the unceasing shock of our guns’ discharges, covered his eyes at night to shut out the flashing lights that pulsed and throbbed constantly across the sky. On the last march that had brought them into the trenches they had passed through guns and guns and yet again guns, first the huge monsters lurking hidden well back and only a little in advance of the great piles of shells and long roofed sidings crammed with more shells, then farther on past other monsters only less in comparison with those they had seen before, on again past whole batteries of 60-pounders and “six-inch” tucked away in corners of woods or amongst broken houses, and finally up through the field guns packed close in every corner that would more or less hide a battery, or brazenly lined up in the open. They tramped down the long street of a ruined village—a street that was no more than a cleared strip of cobblestones bordered down its length on both sides by the piled or scattered heaps of rubble and brick that had once been rows of houses—with a mad chorus of guns roaring and cracking and banging in numberless scores about them, passed over the open behind the trenches to find more guns ranged battery after battery, and all with sheeting walls of flame jumping and flashing along their fronts. They found and settled into their trench with this unbroken roar of fire bellowing in their ears, a roar so loud and long that it seemed impossible to increase it. When their watches told them it was an hour to the moment they had been warned was the “zero hour,” the fixed moment of the attack, the sound of the gun-fire swelled suddenly and rose to a pitch of fury that eclipsed all that had gone before. The men crouched in their trench listening in awed silence, and as the zero hour approached Ratty clambered and stood where he could look over the edge towards the German lines. A sergeant shouted at him angrily to get down, and hadn’t he heard the order to keep under cover? Ratty dropped back beside the others. “Lumme,” he said disgustedly, “I dunno wot this bloomin’ war’s comin’ to. Orders, orders, orders! You mustn’t get plunky well killed nowadays, unless you ’as orders to.”