In the dark they had stumbled into a machine gun position on this little bridge over the dry bed of a creek. They had gone over the five-foot coping on their bellies, their rifles with bayonets fixed swinging free in their hands. Of the five Germans who had been on the bridge only the man now lying here unconscious had seen the dawn come down the valley a few minutes later. For, as Patsy Murtha had remarked: "That Kamerad stuff's all right when you can see what their hands are doin'. But, in the dark--!" With the coming of the light five of the men had put on the tunics and helmets of those who had lately held the place and had stood about the guns, to show enemy watchers on the slopes and in the gullies to the north that things were quite as they should be, while the remainder of the men hid themselves under the coping of the bridge. But the ruse did not avail them long. And this was why Don Mallet was dissatisfied with the direction of the bridge. If it had run more nearly east and west they would have been invisible from a certain wooded gully that cut down through the hill beyond the bridge and which, as happened, lay directly in line with the bridge. The full light had revealed the men in American uniforms strung along under the coping of the bridge. What the German machine gunners in the gully thought is not pertinent. A driving blast of wind swept across the bridge propelled by a rain of machine gun bullets which cleaned the bridge as swiftly as if a giant broom were sweeping ants off it.