umbeat of rain and the wind blowing in their
direction would muffle the movements of the men as they cut paths
through the barbed wires for their panther-like rush. It was the kind of
experiment whose success depends upon every single participant keeping
silence and performing the task set for him with fastidious exactitude.

The Germans, confident in the integrity of their barbed wire, with all
except the sentries whose ears and eyes failed to detect danger asleep
in their dugouts, found that the men of the Maple Leaf had sprung over
the parapet and were at the door demanding surrender. It was an affair
to rejoice the heart of Israel Putnam or Colonel Mosby, and its success
was a new contribution in tactics to stalemate warfare which seemed to
have exhausted every possible invention and novelty. Trench raids were
made over broader and broader fronts until they became considerable
operations, where the wire was cut by artillery which gave the same kind
of support to the men that it was to give later on in the Grand
Offensive.

There was a new terror to trench holding and dwelling. Now the man who
lay down in a dugout for the night was not only in danger of being blown
heavenward by a mine, or buried by the explosion of a heavy shell, or
compelled to spring up in answer to the ring of the gong which announced
a gas attack, but he might be awakened at two a.m. (a favorite hour for
raids) by the outcry of sentries who had been overpowered by the
stealthy rush of shadowy figures in the night, and while he got to his
feet be killed by the burst of a bomb thrown by men whom he supposed
were also fast asleep in their own quarters two or three hundred yards
away.

Trench-raid rivalry between battalions, which commanders liked to
instil, inevitably developed. Battalions grew as proud of their trench
raids as battleships of their target practice. A battalion which had not
had a successful trench raid had something to explain. What pride for
the Bantams--the little fellows below regulation height who had enlisted
in a division of their own on Lord Kitchener's suggestion--when in one
of their trench raids they brought back some hulking, big Germans and a
man's size German machine gun across No Man's Land!

Raiders never attempted to remain long in the enemy's trenches. They
killed the obdurate Germans, took others prisoners and, aside from the
damage that they did, always returned with identifications of the
battalions which oc