“Bring ... your ... men ... over ... carefully ... in ... extended ... order!”

The words floated across on the wind.

Feeling that he would like to see his men all safely across before he left any of them, the Subaltern motioned to the Sergeant to lead them, and they set off in a long, dotted and irregular line towards the thicket.

“Hurry ... them ... up.  Hurry!” shouted the Adjutant.

And just as the last man had left the bank, and he had started himself, he realised what the Adjutant meant.

“Phwhizz ... phwizz ... phwizz.”

Like malignant wasps the bullets hummed past him.  There was a regularity in the discharge and a similarity in the aim that left him no chance to doubt that a machine-gun had been turned on them.

“I was a bit of a fool not to have gone first,” he said to himself.

But the bullets hummed harmlessly by his head and shoulders, and the thought that struck him most forcibly, as he plunged through the cabbages, was the impossibility of realising the consequences if any one of them had been a few inches nearer his head.  It momentarily occurred to him to lie down and crawl through the cabbages, trusting to luck that the machine-gun would lose him; but, of course, the only thing was to run for it, and so he ploughed along.  Whether the journey occupied more than a minute or not he is unable to say, but it seemed an incredible lapse of time before he reached the copse—­and safety.

“We shall have some artillery turned on to us in a minute,” said the Colonel; “we had better get on with the operation.”

They debouched from the copse in open order, and advanced in the usual lines of platoons, to attack the hill.

The Subaltern loosened his sword in his scabbard, so that when the time came he could draw it more easily.  He had already picked up a rifle from some unfortunate.

There seemed to be a certainty of a hand-to-hand fight.  He did not feel at all eager to kill; on the other hand, he scarcely felt afraid.  He just felt as if he grudged the passing of the yards under his feet which separated him from the edge of the wood.  The idea of being “stuck” himself never occurred to him.

The bullets flew about rather thickly for the first few minutes, but no harm was done, and then the enemy’s resistance seemed to die down.  There was complete silence for several minutes as our men plodded steadily on.  Then, away on the right, the Colonel’s whistle sounded, and a halt was called.

The enemy had taken fright and had retired, machine-guns and all, before their advance.

This little affair, although too small to figure in the communiques at home, was a great personal triumph for the Colonel.  The enemy, having broken through the line and pushed his way almost to the banks of the river, had been driven back and the line straightened out, without, as far as the Subaltern could see, any loss whatever.