All that is a long way back, but it serves to explain, perhaps, why Long Jake, 6 ft. 3 in. in height, thin as a lath, but muscled apparently with whipcord and wire rope, known throughout the regiment as a “hard case,” felt a curious and unaccountable jerk back to childhood in his memory as he lay on the edge of a wet shell-hole peering out into the growing grey light. “I’ve never been up here before,” he thought wonderingly, “and I’ve never seen any bit of front like it. Yet I seem to know it by heart.” He knew afterwards, though not then, that it was the “dreary waste” of past dreams—a wide spreading welter of flat ground, broken and tumbled and torn and shiny wet, seen dimly through a misty haze, with nothing in sight but a few splintered bare poles of trees. But Long Jake did not get much time to cudgel his memory. It was almost time for the battalion to “go over the top,” although here to be sure there was no top, and the going over merely meant their climbing out of the chain of wet shell-craters they occupied, and advancing across the flat and up the long slope. Both sides were shelling heavily, but the British, as Jake could judge, by far the heavier of the two. The noise was deafening. The thunder of the guns rose roaring and bellowing without an instant’s break. Overhead the shells howled and yelled and shrieked and whistled and rumbled in every conceivable tone and accent from the slow, lumbering moan and roll of a passing electric tram to the sharp rush of a great bird’s wings. The ground quaked to the roll of the guns like jelly in a shaken mould; out in front of them the barrage was dropping into regular line, spouting in vivid flame that rent the twisting smoke veil quick instant after instant, flinging fountains of water and mud and smoke into the air. Jake heard no order given, did not even hear any whistle blown, but was suddenly aware that dim figures were rising out of the shell-holes to either side, and moving slowly forward. He scrambled out of his crater and moved forward in line with the rest. They went close up to the line of our bursting shells, so close that they could see the leaden hail splashing and whipping up the wet ground before them, so close that Jake more than once ducked instinctively at the vicious crack above his head of one of our own shells bursting and flinging its tearing bullets forward and down. But the line pressed on, and Jake kept level with it; and then, just when it seemed that they must come into that belt of leaping, splashing bullets, the barrage lifted forward, dropped again twenty or thirty yards ahead in another wall of springing smokeclouds and spurting flame.