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and suffered during those early and lean years, if only to be present at their fulfilment.

But at this moment the battle was only beginning, and the bulk of their astounding achievement was still to come. Nevertheless, in the cautious and modest estimate of their Commander-in-Chief, they had already done something.

After ten days and nights of continuous fighting, said the first official report, our troops have completed the methodical capture of the whole of the enemy's first system of defense on a front of fourteen thousand yards. This system of defense consisted of numerous and continuous lines of fire trenches, extending to depths of from two thousand to four thousand yards, and included five strongly fortified villages, numerous heavily wired and entrenched woods, and a large number of immensely strong redoubts. The capture of each of these trenches represented an operation of some importance, and the whole of them are now in our hands.

Quite so. One feels, somehow, that Berlin would have got more out of such a theme.

Now let us get back to our O Pip. If you peer over the shoulder of Captain Leslie, the gunner observing officer, as he directs the fire of his battery situated some thousands of yards in rear, through the medium of map, field-glass, and telephone, you will obtain an excellent view of tomorrow's field of battle. Present in the O Pip are Colonel Kemp, Wagstaffe, Bobby Little, and Angus M'Lachlan. The latter had been included in the party because, to quote his Commanding Officer, "he would have burst into tears if he had been left out."

Overhead roared British shells of every kind and degree of unpleasantness, for the ground in front was being

"prepared" for the coming assault. The undulating landscape, running up to a low ridge on the skyline four miles away, was spouting smoke in all directions-sometimes black, sometimes green, and sometimes, where bursting shell and brick-dust intermingled, blood-red. Beyond the ridge all-conquering British aeroplanes occupied the firmament, observing for "mother" and "granny," and signaling encouragement or reproof to these ponderous but sprightly relatives as their shells hit or missed the target.

"Yes, sir," replied Leslie to Colonel Kemp's question, "that is Longueval, on the slope opposite, with the road running through on the way to Flers, over the skyline. That is Delville Wood on its right. As you see, the guns are concentrating on both places. That is Waterlot Farm, on this side of the wood. Regular nest of machineguns there, I'm told."

"No doubt we shall be able to confirm the rumor tomorrow," said Colonel Kemp drily. "That is Bernafay Wood on our right, I suppose?"

"Yes, sir. We hold the whole of that. The pear-shaped wood out beyond it-it looks as if it were joined on, but the two are quite separate really-is Trones Wood. It has changed hands several times. Just at present I don't think we hold more than the near end. Farther away, half-right, you can. see Guillemont."

"In that case," remarked Wagstaffe, "our right flank would appear to be strongly supported by the enemy."

"Yes. We are in a sort of rightangled salient here. We have the enemy on our front and our right. In fact, we form the extreme right of the attacking front. Our left is perfectly secure, as we now hold Mametz Wood and Contalmaison. There they are." He waved his glass to the North

west. "When the attack takes place, I understand that our Division will go straight ahead, for Longueval and Delville Wood, while the next Division makes a lateral thrust out to the right, to push the Boche out of Trones Wood and cover our flank."

"I believe that is so," said the Colonel. "Bobby, take a good look at the approaches to Longueval. That is the scene of tomorrow's constitutional."

Bobby and Angus obediently scanned the village through their glasses. Probably they did not learn much. One bombarded French village is very like another bombarded French village. A cowering assemblage of battered little houses; a pitiful little main street, with its eviscerated shops and estaminets; a shattered church-spire. Beyond that, an enclosure of splintered stumps that was once an orchard. Below all, cellars, reinforced with props and sandbags, and filled with machine-guns. Voilà tout!

Presently the Gunner Captain passed word down to the telephone operator to order the battery to cease fire.

"Knocking off?" inquired Wagstaffe. "For the present, yes. We are only registering this morning. Not all our batteries are going at once, either. We don't want Brother Boche to know our strength until we tune up for the final chorus. We calculate that--”

"There is a comfortable sense of decency and order about the way we fight nowadays," said Colonel Kemp. "It is like working out a problem in electrical resistance by a nice convenient algebraical formula. Very different from the state of things last year, when we stuck it out by employing rule of thumb and hanging on by our eyebrows."

"The only problem we can't quite formulate is the machine-gun," said Leslie. "The Boche's dug-outs here are

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"So have we all," said Colonel Kemp.

"I forgot to tell you, Colonel," interposed Wagstaffe, "that I met young Osborne at Divisional Headquarters last night. You remember, he left us some time ago to join the Hush! Hush! Brigade."

"I remember," said the Colonel.

By this time the party, including the Gunner Captain, were filing along a communication trench, lately the property of some German gentlemen, on their way back to headquarters.

"Did he tell you anything, Wagstaffe?" continued Colonel Kemp. "Not much. Apparently the time of the H.H.B. is not yet. But he made an appointment with me for this evening-in the gloaming, so to speak. He is sending a car. If all he says is true, the Boche Emma Gee is booked for an eye-opener in a few weeks' time."

II.

That evening a select party of sightseers were driven to a secluded spot behind the battle line. Here they were met by Master Osborne, obviously inflated with some important

matter.

"I've got leave from my C.O. to show you the sights, sir," he announced to Colonel Kemp. "If you

will all stand here and watch that

wood on the opposite side of this clearing, you may see something. We don't show ourselves much except in the late evening, so this is our parade-hour."

The little group took up its appointed stand and waited in the gathering dusk. In the East the sky was already twinkling with intermittent Verey lights. All around the British guns were thundering forth their hymns of hate-full-throated now, for the hour for the next great assault was approaching.

Wagstaffe's thoughts went back to a certain soft September night last year, when he and Blaikie had stood on the Eastern outskirts of Bethune listening to a similar overture-the prelude to the Battle of Loos. But this overture was ten times more awful, and, from a material British point of view, ten times more inspiring. It would have thrilled old Blaikie's fighting spirit, thought Wagstaffe. But Loos had taken his friend from him, and he, Wagstaffe, only was left. What did fate hold in store for him tomorrow? he wondered. And Bobby? They had both escaped marvelously so far. Well, better men had gone before them. Perhaps

Fingers of steel bit into his biceps muscle, and the excited whinny of Angus M'Lachlan besought him to look!

Down in the forest something stirred. But it was not the note of a bird, as the song would have us believe. From the depths of the wood opposite came a crackling, crunching sound, as of some prehistoric beast forcing its way through tropical undergrowth. And then, suddenly, out from the thinning edge there loomed a monster-a monstrosity. It did not glide, it did not walk. It wallowed. It lurched, with now and then a laborious heave of its shoulders. It fumbled its way over a low bank matted with scrub.

It crossed a ditch, by the simple expedient of rolling the ditch out flat, and waddled forward. In its path stood a young tree. The monster arrived at the tree and laid its chin lovingly against the stem. The tree leaned back, crackled, and assumed a horizontal position. In the middle of the clearing, twenty yards farther on, gaped an enormous shell-crater, a present from the Kaiser. Into this the creature plunged blindly, to emerge panting and puffing, on the farther side. Then it stopped. A magic opening appeared in its stomach, from which emerged, grinning, a British subaltern and his grimy associates.

And that was our friends' first encounter with a "Tank." The secretunlike most secrets in this publicityridden War-had been faithfully kept; so far the Hush! Hush! Brigade had been little more than a legend even to the men high up. Certainly the omniscient Hun received the surprise of his life when, in the early mist of a September morning some weeks later, a line of these selfsame tanks burst for the first time upon his incredulous vision, waddling grotesquely up the hill to the ridge which had defied the British infantry so long and so bloodily, there to squat complacently down on the top of expensive machineguns, or spout destruction from her own up and down beautiful trenches which had never been intended for capture. In fact, Brother Boche was quite plaintive about the matter. He described the employment of such engines as wicked and brutal, and opposed to the recognized usages of warfare. When one of these low-comedy vehicles (named the Crême-deMenthe) ambled down the main street of the hitherto impregnable village of Flers, with hysterical British Tommies slapping her on the back, he appealed to the civilized world to step

in and forbid the combination of vulgarism and barbarity.

"Let us at least fight like gentlemen," said the Hun, with simple dignity. "Let us stick to legitimate military devices-the murder of women and children, and the emission of chlorine gas. But Tanks-no! One

must draw the line somewhere!"

But the ill-bred Crême-de-Menthe took no notice. None whatever. She Blackwood's Magazine.

simply went waddling on-towards Berlin.

com

"An experiment, of course,' mented Colonel Kemp, as they returned to headquarters—“a fantastic experiment. But I wish they were ready now. I would give something to see one of them leading the way into action tomorrow. It might mean saving the lives of a good many of my boys."

CHAPTER III.

CHRISTINA'S SON. BY W. M. LETTS.

The mid hours of the night have to the waking a loneliness and solemnity that bring, very often, an unusual self-realization. Self communes with self as never during the busy populous day.

Every sound becomes audible, but yet the tangible seems less than the spiritual; the visible is shadowy and aloof while the invisible asserts its power. The spaciousness of today shrinks and the soul and God draw near. This experience came to Christina as she watched by Lucilla's child. She had tidied the room, done all the offices of a nurse, and now there was nothing that she could do but sit in the dim light with her thoughts.

Kneeling down she said her ordinary evening prayers. To these, she added a petition which came easily enough, that the child might recover. But for Lucilla she would not pray. Her heart was still obdurate. But round this impregnable fortress of her will her thoughts beat. It seemed to her that some invisible power waited for her to yield; that great issues hung upon some act of will that she might make or reject. Did God, she wondered, ask her to bless Lucilla? was forgiveness something more than a mere neutrality

of dislike? Must it be a total sacrifice of the hoarded resentment into the hands of God?

She was conscious that hers was a very humdrum level of Christianity. There were heights she never strove to climb. Was she one who could ask but could not give? For Laurence she asked absolute forgiveness if, as she fancied, his death had been suicide. What if God demanded of her an active forgiveness of Lucilla in which heart and will must co-operate? But the effort seemed beyond her. Again and again she pleaded with herself, or with that invisible Power who seemed to share her watch, that she could forgive any wrong to herself. It was on her son's behalf that she could not, would not forgive.

Then the child started awake with a cry, and Christina went to her to soothe her. As she ministered to the little girl her thoughts went on. Was this sickness really the curse she had laid on Lucilla? She had never meant harm to an innocent child. Still the sins of the fathers are to be visited on the children. It might be her cherished resentment that rendered her very prayers ineffectual.

So the night passed and the gray chill dawn crept into the room, and

with it came Lucilla in the shabby fine dressing-gown. She looked infinitely old and weary.

"Is she worse?" was her only question.

"I don't think she's worse, but she's very feverish."

Lucilla bent over the child, and the mother who watched her knew

every throb of the agony of apprehension that she suffered.

"I'll go and lie down, Lucilla," Christina said softly. Conscience was urging her to say something kind, to do some foolish act such as taking the miserable woman in her arms and sealing forgiveness with a kiss, so she fled from conscience.

In the morning the doctor came. He was a kindly, sensitive little man, full of pity for the young Englishwoman. He was delighted to find, as he supposed, that the devoted grandmother had arrived. She would at least be some comfort to the poor mother when the expected end should come, for he had no doubt of the end. "You must take care of your poor daughter," he said to Christina; "she is worn out with anxiety and the nursing of her child."

Christina nodded. She did, indeed, in a dutiful way urge Lucilla to eat, to go out for a little, to spare herself. She gave her what money she had, and told Mr. Ingleby to bring anything that she needed. All these ministrations Lucilla accepted sullenly. She was like an animal made docile by great hunger. In her necessity she had to accept help, but Christina was conscious of the defiant hatred that underlay the submission.

Once in the morning Christina, urged by some impulse, asked: "Does Marie's father know how ill she is?"

"Her father!" Lucilla laughed bitterly. "I'm nothing to her father, nor is she. He's got some one else to think of."

Then Christina realized that justice had indeed been done, that Lucilla had received in full measure the bitterness she had meted out to another.

"Yes, you're glad," said the girl; "oh! of course you are. I don't think I wonder. Poor Laurence! I wonder if he suffered as I suffered. We should understand each other now, shouldn't we?"

"You know Laurence forgave you everything."

"Yes, but you don't. You think I killed him, you said so, that I'd murdered him. You've no right to think that. His death was just an accident, the jury said so at the inquest." Christina was silent.

Later in the day Mr. Ingleby called again. He insisted that Christina should come out for an hour or two in the fresh April air.

"You are looking jaded," he said; "the walk will do you good."

He offered her his arm in his formal old-world way, and she took it graciously.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"You will have no heart for shops," he answered, "so we'll avoid the Montagne de la Cour. I thought of going by tram to the Bois de Cambre and giving you tea at the Laiterie, but now I have another fancy. There is a little old church that I love very much; oh! not beautiful like St. Gudule or Notre Dame du Sablon, no, not that, but so poor, so homely, so saturated by prayer that it is the very haunt of those in trouble."

It was almost in a dream that Christina walked by the old man down into the town. Once he pointed to a street in process of demolition, and reminded her of Charlotte Brontë and the Héger establishment. As on the day of her arrival, she felt wonder and excitement in the sense of being abroad. But the beauty of the archi

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