ed her. Here and there, on each
side of her, a column of dirt and snow rose into the air. But the
little animal seemed to bear a charmed life. No harm came to her, and
she went calmly on her way, for all the world like a giant tortoise at
which one vainly throws clods of earth.

As it grows lighter, we can now see others in the distance. One is not
moving--is it out of action? The only motion on the whole landscape is
that of the bursting shells, and the tanks. Over the white snow in
front of the German wire, are dotted little black lumps. Some crawl,
some move a leg or an arm, and some lie quite still. One who has never
seen a modern battle doubtless forms a picture of masses of troops
moving forward in splendid formation, with cheering voices and
gleaming bayonets. This is quite erroneous. To an observer in a post
or in a balloon, no concerted action is visible at all. Here and there
a line or two of men dash forward and disappear. A single man or a
small group of men wriggle across the ground. That is all.

"Well, they haven't got it in the neck as I supposed," said Darwin.
"Remarkably few lying about. Let's push on."

"All right," Talbot assented. "If you like."

We crawled over the top of the embankment and continued down the side.
About two hundred yards to the left, we saw one of the tanks, with her
nose in the air. A little group of three or four men were digging
around her, frantically. We rushed over to them, and found that the
Old Bird's 'bus had failed to get over a large pit which lay in the
middle of No Man's Land, and was stuck with her tail in the bottom of
the ditch. Here occurred one of those extraordinary instances of luck
which one notices everywhere in a modern battle. The tank had been
there about ten minutes when the German gunners had bracketed on her,
and were dropping five-nines, all of them within a radius of seventy
yards of the tank, and yet no one was hurt. Finally, by dint of
strenuous digging, she started up and pulled herself wearily out of
the pit.

[Illustration: _Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N.Y._
A TANK HALFWAY OVER THE TOP AND AWAITING THE ORDER TO ADVANCE
IN THE BATTLE OF MENIN ROAD]

Suddenly, Darwin shouted:--

"Look here, you fellows! What are these Boches doing?"

Looking up, we saw about forty or fifty Germans stumbling over their
own wire, and running toward us as hard as they could go. For a moment
we thought it was the preliminary step of a coun