soldiers touched elbows
with each other, and Canadian and Australian fraternized in a common
enterprise. Here again the old trench life was resumed; sentinel duty,
daring adventures, wild charges, the shock and din of constant battle,
brief periods of rest and recuperation. But the process of attrition
was going on, the enemy was being pushed back, inch by inch it seemed,
but always, eventually, back. As for Pen, he led a charmed life. Men
fell to right of him and to left of him, and were torn into shreds at
his back; but, save for superficial wounds, for temporary
strangulation from gas, for momentary insensibility from shock, he was
unharmed.

It was in October, after Lieutenant Davis had been promoted to the
captaincy, that Pen was made second lieutenant of his company. He well
deserved the honor. There was a little celebration of the event among
his men, for his comrades all loved him and honored him. They said it
would not be long before he would be wearing the Victoria Cross on his
breast. Yet few of them had been with him from the beginning. Of those
who had landed with him upon French soil the preceding May only a
pitifully small percentage remained. Killed, wounded, missing, one by
one and in groups, they had dropped out, and the depleted ranks had
been filled with new blood.

In November they were sent up into the Arras sector, but in December
they were back again in their old quarters on the Somme. And yet it
was not their old quarters, for the British front had been advanced
over a wide area, for many miles in length, and imperturbable Tommies
were now smoking their pipes in many a reversed trench that had
theretofore been occupied by gray-clad Boches. But they were not
pleasant trenches to occupy. They were very narrow and very muddy, and
parts of the bodies of dead men protruded here and there from their
walls and parapets. Moreover, in December it is very cold in northern
France, and, muffle as they would, even the boys from Canada suffered
from the severity of the weather. They asked only to be permitted to
keep their blood warm by aggressive action against their enemy. And,
just before the Christmas holidays, the aggressive action they had
longed for came.

It was no great battle, no important historic event, just an incident
in the policy of attrition which was constantly wearing away the
German lines. An attempt was to be made to drive a wedge into the
enemy's front at a certain vital point, and,