The Allied counter-attack struck deep along the whole line. Soissons and Montdidier, we hear, are once more in our hands; while farther north, in Flanders, the British Third and Fourth Armies are sweeping forward for the last time in the blood-soaked valley of the Lys. As for the American share, we have not heard too much, but what we have heard is enough to make us tingle. We hear of great work by the Regulars of the First, Second, and Third Divisions; by the Twenty-sixth—the Yankees of New England—and by the Forty-second Rainbow Division, from Yaphank. It is also reported that other American Divisions made no small impression upon Brother Boche—the Fourth, the Twenty-eighth; the Thirty-second, and the Seventy-seventh. The Twenty-seventh and Thirtieth, we understand, are somewhere with the British opposite the Hindenburg Line near Cambrai. Doubtless we shall hear something of them too, in due course. Great days, great days! But to what a fever of exasperation are we aroused, who are not there ourselves! CHAPTER TWELVE CHASING MONOTONY At present the authorities are engaged in impressing upon us the truth of the maxim which says that you must not run before you can walk. Our immediate duty is to show that we can stand the test of ordinary trench warfare. First, such every-day nuisances as the German sniper. And here we have a pleasant little success to record. When we took over these trenches, snipers were numerous and vigilant. If you raised your head above the parapet, one of two things happened. Either you heard a sound like the crack of a whip-lash close to your ear; or you did not. If you did, you were lucky. If you did not, you were buried at dusk. There is one piece of slightly rising ground in the enemy’s line which commands an oblique view of a stretch of our front trenches. For a week we have been pestered by a sniper concealed somewhere along this eminence, about three hundred yards away, on our right front. We have scrutinized its whole expanse with periscopes and through loopholes, but there is no sign of trench or emplacement where the sniper might be concealed. Yesterday that untutored but resourceful fire-eater, Eddie Gillette, turned his attention to the matter, the urgency of which had been impressed upon him by the fact that a sniper’s bullet, travelling sidewise down the trench, had chipped a groove in Eddie’s own “tin derby” that very morning, Eddie’s head being inside at the time. “We got to locate that lobster,” he observed. And he did.