"Tighter, tighter!" motioned the sufferer. "How is it going? For me, I do not mind if you pull my head off, provided we take the trench." Dennis peeped through a crack in the wall and bent over him. "The attack has been completely successful," he said. "The supports are swarming in now." "_Vive la patrie!_" cried the wounded man, whose grey-blue tunic was stained crimson with his own blood. "I thank you from the bottom of my heart, lieutenant. Again you heap the coals of fire upon me." Then he fainted. "Come along, Alphonse," said one of the stretcher-bearers to his companion. "We must get him to the surgeon at once." "And we," said the Alsatian corporal, touching Dennis on the arm. "Shall we return up yonder?" The commandant's revolver lay among the nettles, Dennis picked it up, and the pair raced side by side again up the trampled slope. Lithe and active as Dennis was, his new friend, loaded with his pack and hung about with bulging wallets and strings of racket bombs, was over the parapet before him, and the boy's after-recollection of the ten minutes that followed was a chaotic jumble of mad slaughter. The French infantry were in terrible earnest, and out to kill. They had old scores to wipe off, and at the outset nothing could stay them. Figures in blue grey and figures in greeny grey wrestled and fought in the drifting smoke, and what with the hideous gas helmets and their huge goggles, and the mediaeval-looking trench helmets, Dennis seemed to have suddenly found himself in the company of weird demons from some other world. Men stabbed and hewed and hacked at each other. Others, gripped in tight embrace, were seen revolving in a species of grim waltz, until a chance bullet or a piece of shell ended the dance of death. The wounded squeezed themselves against the boarded sides, the dead lay where they fell, and the living took no notice of either. If there was any shouting the guns drowned it, and the lust of slaughter was in every face. "I do not think there will be any poison gas," shouted the Alsatian corporal, whose name was Aristide Puzzeau. "The wind is in the wrong quarter, but you never know what these Boches are up to." He handed him a gas helmet, which he took from a dead comrade, and without waiting for any thanks, Corporal Puzzeau pursued his way. Dug-out after dug-out he bombed, and when his supply was exhausted he unslung his rifle with its long, thin bayonet, Dennis following upon his heels. The barrage fire, playing a couple of hundred yards in rear of the German parados, effectually kept the enemy's supports in check, and Dennis wisely possessed himself of a steel helmet, for the shrapnel had a habit of raining down on friend and foe alike, but after they had gone some distance in a northerly direction, they found that the enemy had recovered from the first surprise, and a strong counter-attack was forcing a company of poilus back.