The line of guns lay in the centre of a great shallow saucer of ground, scarred with zig-zag trenches; and as the first blue of dawn cleared to white, the men who laboured could see, straight to their front and on the lip of the saucer, the shattered top of a solitary tree. And looking to the left of the tree, they saw,—first of all—a road, and then a big battered farm-house, beyond which—miles away as it seemed to the weary men—rose over the ultimate edge of the huge saucer a something which Gunner Mucksweat, miner by trade, pronounced to be the wheel of a pithead. Had Gunner Mucksweat been able to read a map, he would have known the pithead wheel for the top of Fosse Eight. Prolonging the line of guns on the left ran the road they had traversed during the night—at its end, the torn roofs of Vermelles; and behind the guns, bunched together over a square mile of ground, stood horses—hundreds and hundreds of horses. For the fourth Southdown Brigade was not alone in that huge saucer of chalk! And behind the horses, parallel to the guns, lay another road, lined with red brick houses, above which towered the huge slag-cone of Fosse Seven. § 2 The toe of a boot woke 2nd Lieutenant Stanley Purves to consciousness of the fact that he was sleeping in the lee of a particularly noisome hay-stack. “Get up,” said P.J. “The Colonel wants you.” “What’s the time?” asked the thing under the hay. “Half-past four.” “My grief, what a time to get up!” He struggled to his feet, pulling wet wisps from his hair; realized that he could hardly walk for cramp; limped forward; stumbled over a low stretcher on two-cycle wheels, into the shafts of a hooded cart painted with a large Red Cross. “Anybody want me?” Doctor Carson, a light sleeper, pushed his white head out from the tilt; saw Purves making for the guns. “Suppose I’d better get up,” said the Doctor; and in doing so, woke Horrocks the Vet. They cursed each other, and stepped out onto the wet ground. Said Purves, returning: “The Weasel wants his breakfast, and he wants it damn quick.” He limped off to find Gunner Horne, found him asleep under the spidery telephone-waggon. Him, by right of seniority, Purves kicked also. Moreover, after a careful reconnaissance, the Balliol man discovered two foreign-looking boots projecting from the afore-said hay-stack, which—being sternly pulled—produced Morency. Meanwhile the four battery commanders—Torrington, hobbling along somehow in the rear—followed by two men carrying a red drum of wire, were toiling up the slope towards “Lone Tree.” § 3 “Have you been smoking those cab-rankers of yours _all_ night, P.J.?” asked the Weasel. They were standing in the middle of the gun-line, watching Charlie Straker as he bent over the pointer of his No. 1 director. “I should lay on that tree till you hear from Torrington,” said Stark; and repeated his question to Peter. “Pretty well, sir.”