them he found them bayoneting and
bombing their way along a zigzag trench, and Harry Hawke in the act of
scoring "2/12th R.R." on the shield of a captured machine-gun with the
point of his dripping weapon.

"Where is Mr. Dashwood?" cried young Wetherby.

"Straight ahead, sir. 'Follow the tram-lines,' and you can't miss him!"
And Harry Hawke pointed with a grin to the zigzag trench.

They ran together along the broken parapet as the explosion of the hand
bombs suddenly ceased, and from the way the battalion was crowded in the
trench below them with a goodly assortment of unwounded prisoners,
progress seemed to have been checked for a moment.

Stumbling over bodies, and every now and then getting entangled among
strands of broken wire; blundering down into some trench-mortar hole and
up again at the other side, Wetherby and Hawke at length came upon Bob
Dashwood and Dennis, where the trench ended abruptly without any
apparent rhyme or reason.

"Hallo, what's up?" Wetherby called, removing his mask and putting on
his helmet, seeing that his brother officers had done the same, the
battalion being now beyond the gas zone.

"Wait a minute," replied Dennis. "They'll send up another flare, and
then you'll see."

Overhead soared a rocket from the German lines, and as the light made
everything grotesquely visible, the outline of a building showed blackly
fifty yards from the trench end.

It was a small chateau, which, from its position in a fold of the ground
behind a little ridge, had somehow escaped the havoc of our bombardment.

The ridge round which the trench end curved had been ploughed and
mangled and heaped up into a ragged contour, but beyond some gaping
holes in the high-pitched slate roof and a yawning gap in the northern
wing, the chateau stood behind a tall wall, with an iron gate obligingly
open, as if inviting them to enter.

"You see what's happened," explained the O.C. "The place would be so
obviously dominated by the capture of this ridge that the beggars
haven't thought it worth while turning it into a redoubt. It's very
tempting, but it might prove a death-trap if they've got their heavy
guns trained on it."

"There's another thing," said Dennis in further explanation to Wetherby.
"We've taken about a couple of hundred prisoners, and killed somewhere
about the same number, but the rest of the enemy battalion has
mysteriously disappeared. We've bombed all the dug-outs we can find, but
there's one