THE public room (which in England would be the Public Bar) of the “Cheval Blanc” estaminet, or “Chevvle Blank” as its present-day customers know it, had filled very early in the evening. Those members of the Labour Company who packed the main room had just returned to the blessings of comparative peace after a very unpleasant spell in the line which had culminated in a last few days—and the very last day especially—on a particularly nasty “job o’ work.” Making a corduroy road of planks across an apparently bottomless pit of mud in a pouring rain and biting cold wind cannot be pleasant work at any time. When you stir in to the dish of trouble a succession of five-point-nine high-explosive shells howling up out of the rain and crashing thunderously down on or about the taped-out line of road, it is about as near the limit of unpleasantness as a Labour Company cares to come. The job was rushed, five-nines being a more drastic driver than the hardest hustling foreman, but the German gunners evidently had the old road nicely ranged and had correctly estimated the chance of its being reconstructed, with the result that their shells pounded down with a horrible persistency which might have stopped anything short of the persistency of the Company and the urgency of the road being put through. The men at work there, stripped to open-throated and bare-armed shirts, and yet running rivers of sweat for all their stripping, drove the work at top speed on this last day in a frantic endeavour to complete before dark. They knew nothing of the tactical situation, nothing of what it might mean to the success or failure of “the Push” if the road were not ready to carry the guns and ammunition waggons by that nightfall, knew only that “Roarin’ Bill, The Terrible Turk,” had pledged the Company to finish that night, and that “Roarin’ Bill” must not be let down. It must be explained here that “Roarin’ Bill” was the Captain in command of the Company, and although the men perhaps hardly knew it themselves, or ever stopped to reason it out, the simple and obvious reason for their reluctance to let him down was merely because they knew that under no circumstances on earth would he let them, the Company, down. His nickname was a private jest of the Company’s, since he had the voice and manners of a sucking dove. But for all that his orders, his bare word, or even a hint from him, went farther than any man’s, and this in about as rough and tough a Company as a Captain could well have to handle. “Bill” had said they must finish before dark, walked up and down the plank road himself watching and directing the work, and never as much as looked—that they knew of—at the watch on his wrist to figure whether they’d make out or not. “Th’ Terrible Turk ’as spoke; wot ’e ’as said, ’e blanky well ’as said,” Sergeant Buck remarked once as the Captain passed down the road, “an’ all the shells as Gerry ever pitched ain’t goin’ to alter it. Come