nly just in time. Over
them swept a veritable hail of machine gun bullets.

"Dig in! Dig in!" commanded the lieutenant.

Frantically with their picks and shovels the Sammies began to make
shallow ditches in which to lie. The upraised earth would offer some
protection against the forward sweeping lead, though not very much
against shrapnel which explodes in the air above and is driven
downward.

And as the four Brothers were making shallow trenches they wondered,
with sorrow in their hearts, if there was a chance that Iggy had been
left alive.

"If we stay here long enough, I'll see if I can't get permission to go
back and find out," mused Jimmy, as he frantically scraped the earth
into a sort of long mound in front of his head. They were under a hot
fire now. The American advance had been momentarily checked.

And while there is this period in the fighting may I not take
advantage of it to make my new readers acquainted with the main
characters of this story, and also tell something of the previous books
in this series?

The initial volume is called "The Khaki Boys at Camp Sterling," and in
the pages of that you meet, for the first time, Jimmy, Roger, Bob and
Iggy. To introduce them more formally I will say that Jimmy's correct
name was James Sumner Blaise, and that he was the son of wealthy
parents. He was about nineteen years old, and this was the average age
of his comrades.

Roger Barlow was an orphan, and had been working in a munition factory
when he decided to enlist. Robert Dalton had been a "cub" reporter
on a newspaper, and, like Roger, was an orphan. Though Ignace was no
orphan, possessing both father and mother and a number of sisters and
brothers, his home life was not happy, and he was really glad to join
the army.

These four lads soon became "bunkies" at Camp Sterling, where they
had their training. Later they took into their friendship one Franz
Schnitzel, who, though possessed of a German name, was, nevertheless,
a loyal "United Stateser," as Iggy called it. Franz had a hard time,
at first, convincing people of his loyalty, and once he was accused of
a black crime, but later he was proved innocent.

After having been trained at the camp, and cementing their friendship
in many ways, the "five Brothers" as they called themselves, were sent
across. In the second book of the series, "The Khaki Boys On the
Way," we find our youthful heroes sailing for France after a series of
adventures, one a