They passed through a thick wood, but the engineers had been before them, and there was at least the semblance of a broad path, now well beaten down by the hundreds of their fellow men who had passed through before them during the last two hours. Once a felled tree which had not entirely flattened to the ground, broke off at the stump with a sharp crack and crunching sound. On the instant every man was flat on the soggy earth, listening, intent, ready for a surprise attack or any emergency. But Tom recognized the voice of his own captain, fifty feet on the other side of it, instructing the men as to the route of their passage, and in a moment more they were again on their way. They were coming now into the area of the furthest obstacles and entanglements that had been thrown out by the Germans, and as they swung into a broad and fairly level road, the piles of barbed wire along its sides testified to the rapid, but efficient work of the wire-cutters who had been there for two preceding nights unobserved, and were even now but a short distance ahead, paving the way with the pioneers for the great hosts of infantry and tanks that soon were to attack the enemy. “Lively now, men,” Lieutenant Gaston instructed as they came upon this highway; and again they swung into a trot, after ten minutes of which, as though it had all been done by clock work, they closed in with the balance of Company C. “If an enemy flare goes up, each man into the gutter along the roadside without a second’s hesitation,” Captain McCallum ordered. “And no noise from now on.” It was as though he had said to them: “A few hundred yards ahead are the enemy outposts, with sentries listening for the slightest warning.” And indeed that was true. They entered a rocky, shell-torn, treacherous field, where even the art and energy of the Engineers had failed entirely to fill all the pits or level all the mounds thrown up by the powerful projectiles which the Boches had directed there. The pace slackened, to avert accident or discovery, and the men literally crawled along, their unit only kept intact by each man keeping in touch with those on either side of him. Their baptism of fire came while crossing this vast stretch of open ground. They were on their final lap of the march to the communication trenches when there was a roar from behind the German lines and a big shell broke almost directly in front of Company D. By the spasm of light that accompanied the explosion the boys from Brighton saw at least half a dozen of D company men go down. Whether they were killed, wounded or merely thrown to the ground by the force of the shock they did not learn until later. But it proved that three men had been killed outright, two others fatally and a third slightly injured.