"It's sincerely to be hoped they have, sir," said Captain Bob dryly. "There was a dickens of a lot of it. But we shall get through without a doubt. Not long to wait now, for there go the trench mortars." Mingling with the continuous roar of our guns came a still louder and very insistent sound, to which they listened in silence, every officer of the battalion with his eye on his watch. "Well, good luck, old chap!" said Bob suddenly, gripping Dennis by the hand. And the two brothers looked at each other with the same thought behind the quiet confidence of their smile. It might be the last time they would ever meet on earth, but they faced the possibility without fear, and already a dense cloud of smoke, released along our whole front, was shrouding the waiting line. "Seven-thirty to the tick," said the C.O. "Reedshires--Get over!" And in an instant the battalion was swarming out of its trench, and advancing over the two hundred yards of broken ground which separated the brigade from the enemy, with sloped arms. It was terrible going, for the whole earth was honeycombed by craters large and small; but out of the smoke-cloud rose a ringing cheer, which was still floating on the air when the vicious tac-tac of machine-guns from the German lines told that even high explosives had their limitations, and that some at least of the enemy gun-emplacements remained undestroyed. "Double!" cried the C.O., seeing that a kilted battalion on his left was racing forward as the best means of escaping the continuous stream of bullets. "Charge, boys, charge!" yelled Dennis, taking up the cry; and that brown avalanche of eager, helmeted men poured on clear of the smoke into the bright sunshine, which glinted on their fixed bayonets. In spite of the carefully prepared staff maps and plans which they had all studied closely, Dennis looked in vain for any sign of a definite objective. There was no sandbagged parapet, nothing but a confused mass of holes and heaps scattered broadcast over the landscape--the result of the terrific spade-work of the guns--which had to be crossed before the village was reached. The village, too, of which he caught a glimpse, was only a pulverised mass of debris, with here and there the angle of a shattered house or the ribs of a roof to mark what had once been human habitations. But he knew that the strength of the enemy's position lay in the wonderful subterranean works, the deep dug-outs, the covered-in communicating trenches, and for these he and his men rushed with great determination. Suddenly, from the other side of a chalk heap, a row of heads appeared, wearing flat blue forage caps with white bands round them, and a shout of rapture rose from No. 2 Platoon as they saw at last something to go for.