Boyd Cable has suddenly become one of the foremost word painters of active fighting--"the greatest literary discovery of the War." He is primarily a man of action. At the age of twenty, he joined a corps of Scouts in the Boer War and fought in South Africa. He then became a traveler and spent some time in Australia and New Zealand, in the Philippines, Java and the Islands of the Pacific. He is a "knight of adventure"--he has been an ordinary seaman, a typewriter agent, a steamer fireman, office manager, hobo, gold prospector, coach driver, navvy. He was one of the first men not in the Regular Army to get a commission and be sent to the front in 1914. As an observation officer in the artillery, he was "spotted" by the enemy sharpshooters, got a bullet through his cap, one through the inside of his sleeve close to his heart, and fifty-three others near enough for him to hear them pass--all in less than an hour. After eighteen months of this death-defying work without even a wound, he was invalided home on account of stomach trouble and then began to write of his adventures. His books, "Behind the Line," "Action Front," and "Doing Their Bit," are acknowledged to be the most vivid and stimulating pictures of the War as seen by the men in the trenches. We here record his story of the tanks from his volume of tales entitled "Grapes of Wrath," by permission of his publishers, _E. P. Dutton and Company_: Copyright 1917. [5] I--STORY OF "KENTUCKY"--AN AMERICAN IN THE BRITISH TRENCHES Soon after Kentucky rejoined them the Stonewalls were moved forward a little clear of the village they had helped to take, just as one or two heavy shells whooped over from the German guns and dropped crashing on the ground that had been theirs. The men were spread out along shell holes and told to dig in for better cover because a bit of a redoubt on the left flank hadn't been taken and bullets were falling in enfilade from it. "Dig, you cripples," said the sergeant, "dig in. Can't you see that if they counter-attack from the front now you'll get shot in the back while you're lining the front edge of those shell holes. Get to it there, you Pug." "Shot in the back, linin' the front," said Pug as the sergeant passed on. "Is it a conundrum, Kentuck?" "Sounds sort of mixed," admitted Kentucky. "But it's tainted some with the truth. That redoubt is half rear to us. If another lot comes at us in front and we get up on the front edge of this shell hole, there's nothing to stop the redoubt bullets hitting us in the back. Look at that," he concluded, nodding upward to where a bullet had smacked noisily into the mud above their heads as they squatted in the hole.