was a palace, hiding him, as it did, from inquisitive
eyes.

"Surely it is written that I shall win through," he thought to himself.
"Everything seems to point to it."

A shell burst close to them and rattled the corrugated iron, bringing a
shower of earth down in front of the dug-out door.

"I will go and see if that has done any damage," said the sergeant. "You
may stay here until the alarm is given. Your post will be in that bay in
front of us. Why don't you go to sleep? I should if I were not an
_Unteroffizier_."

He came back again in a few minutes, to find that Dennis had taken him
at his word, and was watching the rats fearlessly searching for crumbs
between his very feet.

"A corporal and five men," said the sergeant laconically. "And a
splinter has broken the Herr Captain's glasses. Oh, he is in a rare
fury!"

Another shell burst farther away behind the dug-out, and Dennis wondered
whether the French gunners were lengthening their fuses preparatory to
the counter-attack.

Mist still hung about the ground, and the moon gave it a very ghostly
effect.

Peeping through the door from the dark dug-out--for a rat had suddenly
pounced upon the lighted candle and made off with it--he saw the
look-out motionless and alert behind the sandbagged parapet, and,
sitting on the fire-step, the men of No. 6 Company huddled up. Some of
them were asleep with their heads on their comrades' shoulders. The man
who had been five times wounded bent forward, grasping one wrist with
the other hand, and staring into vacancy; perhaps he was thinking of his
dead wife!

Without warning a terrific fire suddenly opened on the village; and
Dennis, used as he was to the British bombardment, sat dazed in his
cubby-hole as shell after shell burst in such quick succession that the
explosions seemed like the continuous fire of some giant machine-gun. He
put his hands to his ears and crouched there, bowed, like one awaiting
inevitable doom, wondering how it fared with the company outside in the
trench and with the rest of the battalion.

For a quarter of an hour the inferno continued, and then ceased as
suddenly as it had begun; and in the lull that followed he rose to his
feet, knowing that the dug-out would not be a safe place in which to
await the counter-attack which would come on the heels of that terrible
devastation.

In the doorway he stumbled over something soft, and recognised the
upturned face of the good-natured sergeant!