the crumpled ruins of the
cottage, they found two stretcher-bearers kneeling among the nettles, on
the look-out for casualties. They had seen them coming, and the
stretcher was already unrolled, and as they laid him upon it the wounded
man motioned with his hand.

"Stand round me," he said in a husky whisper, speaking with difficulty.
"Do not let them see who it is that is hit."

One of the brancardiers placed a pad under the commandant's ear, and
passed a bandage round his neck.

"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 o