After careful questioning he learned enough to open his eyes. The French lines had indeed passed northward, leaving this ruined hamlet in its wake. But for several months prior to yesterday's engagement the Germans had been working on gigantic subterranean operations, beginning at the levels of the cellar floors and penetrating downward until the entire village sub-area had been converted into a kind of catacomb. Here a great number of machine-guns were stored with quantities of ammunition, and a garrison put in charge which numbered upwards of two thousand men. A machine-gun regiment, he mentally noted. These had fought when the French came but, instead of retreating, ducked into the sub-cellars and closed the openings which had been artfully contrived to escape notice. When the French passed, thinking the enemy had been driven before them, the Boche quietly emerged after nightfall and slipped away in several directions, taking many guns and spades and boxes of ammunition. Jeb felt that he now understood the mystery of that digging party back on the plain, as also the nearer sounds. They were units of this garrison--and there must be many others like them scattered about--fortifying for a particular counter attack tomorrow when, with a line of machine-gun sections operating in the Allied rear, defeat might be turned to victory. It was an audacious scheme, thus to burrow while a victorious army passed over them, and then come up out of the ground and strike again! "How far is it to the place they're digging here?" he asked. "Just there, beyond this wall--but a little ways," she pointed in the direction from which the sentry had come. "How many are there?" "I could not say, Monsieur; but few, assuredly, as I saw quite as many as I thought were in the ground, and more, slip away after dark with the guns and spades and boxes." "Then wait very quietly till I come back," he lifted her from his lap, but she clung desperately and would have cried had he not promised to return safely. She let him go then and he crawled away, passing just outside the door to see if the street were clear. Skirting the torn walls and keeping in the heavier shadows, creeping over piles of rubble as silently as a rat, he came at last to a point which overlooked the hole where men toiled, wearily, though in desperate haste. The sentry paced back and forth within a hundred feet of him, sometimes speaking in monosyllables to his comrades below.