Beyond lay a triple line of barbed wire. By one of those freakish circumstances the entanglements had escaped the devastating hail of shells. A few posts had been shattered, some strands of wire cut through, but, generally, this defence work was as efficacious as ever, as the crowd of bodies in khaki and field-grey that were "hung up" on the tenacious barbs testified. A bomb dropped from a hostile machine fell within ten yards of the Tank. In spite of her bulk and weight, the huge fabric trembled under the concussion. "Beastly mean trick!" thought Ralph. "That Hun airman knows that we cannot see him, and that we don't carry antis. Wonder what our fliers are doing to let him amuse himself in this manner?" With a sickening crash a biplane came to earth, right in the path of the moving Tank. A glance at the twisted wreckage showed that the infamous Black Cross was painted on the planes. Ralph had a smart answer to his question. Our airmen had been busy up aloft. Setley did not trouble to turn aside his command. Right over the debris of the German biplane she waddled, crushing metal and wood into an unrecognizable pulp, and then thrust her blunt nose into the outer line of barbed wire. Like a rhinoceros tearing up jungle grass with its formidable horns the Tank set about to destroy the entanglements. Posts snapped off like carrots, coils of wire suddenly released from tension quivered in the air until borne down and buried deep in the earth by the broad traction bands of the landship. The while machine-gun bullets rattled harmlessly against her armoured hide, bombs exploded on, against, and underneath the terrible war-machine. The car of Juggernaut would cut a very poor show compared with this motor-propelled fortress. Other Tanks were engaged in similar operations, keeping parallel to the line of direction of the hostile trenches and methodically uprooting the entanglements in as many minutes as it had taken the Germans days to set up in position. Having completed this part of the programme the Tanks made for the sand-bagged parapet at the raised end of the glacis, while simultaneously with this movement the whistles went, and the British infantry rushed forward with an irresistible _élan_. Their attention divided between the terrifying landships, that were crunching over emplacements and trenches, and the glittering array of bayonets, the German machine-gunners, unfortunately for them, did not take into account a couple of British biplanes, Cleaving through the dense eddying clouds of smoke and recklessly disregarding the bursting shells the intrepid airmen descended to within a hundred feet of the Von der Golz Redoubt and the adjacent trenches. A hail of bullets from the airmen's Lewis guns--death-dealing hornets--caught the Huns unawares, creating havoc in the dense masses of grey-coated infantry.