he bayonet," and he dreaded that they should pass the
wire.

The first of the thin line was at the entanglement. Most of them dropped
before they touched a wire, but others cut a single strand before a bullet
found its berth. They died; but they had succeeded in their mission. A
thread of life cut to sever a strand of wire!

The wave had risen and was breaking over the entanglement. They were
beginning to get through. Here and there a man lumbered up the gentle
slope toward our trenches only to fall before he reached them. The mass
of them was worming through the wire now.

A shrill whistle blew. From our trenches came a sound like the beating of
a hundred pneumatic hammers. It was the music of Hell. The machine guns
and artillery were making it, and they were spitting out death in streams
to the accompaniment of their devilish music. God was answering the prayer
of the little lad. The Germans were dropping at the wire; they would not
pass.

The wee death engines were playing just a foot or so above the bottom of
the wire, and they were literally cutting the legs from under the mass of
grey-clad men. The back wash from the wave which broke against the wire
was thinner than the wash that had preceded it.

"Thank God!" gasped the boy; "I did not have to use my bayonet."

"It's guid steel wasted," growled a ginger-whiskered old-timer on my left,
as he wiped the dampness from the blade with his sleeve and dropped the
bayonet back into its scabbard.

[To-day such an attack on the British lines would invariably be followed
by a counter attack to show the Germans that the initiative lies--always
must lie--with the Allies; but, in those days, we had not the men. Our
lines were often so thin that, had they been pierced at a single point, we
would have been crumpled up like paper.]

After this fight, we were relieved by an East Yorkshire regiment and told
that we would go to billets about three miles in the rear, but we had
scarcely left the trenches when we received orders to get to billets and
hold ourselves in readiness to occupy a new position in the line. The
Black Watch at that time was again brought up to strength by the addition
of a re-enforcement of five hundred men.

A party of us was sent to guard a bridge that our engineers were
repairing, it having been blown up the previous day by big shell fire. I
had just got off duty and was sitting before the log fire in the
block-house with a few other fellows, when