To the right, a few hundred yards away, was posted a Lancashire regiment, supported by a battalion from Cornwall. On the left were two French regiments. In front, facing the hill-slope and not a half-mile distant, was the geometric arrangement of sandbags that marked the contour of the German first-line trenches.
The hill behind them, the boches in front of them, French and British troops on either side of them--the Here-We-Comes were helping to defend what was known as a "quiet' sector. Behind the hill, and on loftier heights far to the rear, the Allied artillery was posted. Somewhere in the same general locality lay a division of British reserves.
It is almost a waste of words to have described thus the surroundings of the Here-We-Comes. For, with no warning at all, those entire surroundings were about to be changed.
Ludendorff and his little playmates were just then engaged in the congenial sport of delivering unexpected blows at various successive points of the Allied line, in an effort to find some spot that was soft enough to cave in under the impact and let through a horde of gray-clad Huns. And though none of the defenders knew it, this "quiet" sector had been chosen for such a minor blow.
The men in higher command, back there behind the hill crest, had a belated inkling, though, of a proposed attack on the lightly defended front trenches. For the Allied airplanes which drifted in the upper heavens like a scattered handful of dragon-flies were not drifting there aimlessly. They were the eyes of the snakelike columns that crawled so blindly on the scarred brown surface of the earth. And those "eyes" had discerned the massing of a force behind the German line had discerned and had duly reported it.
The attack might come in a day. It might not come in a week. But it was coming--unless the behind-the-lines preparations were a gigantic feint.
A quiet dawn, in the quiet trenches of the quiet sector.
Desultory artillery and somewhat less desultory sniping had prevailed throughout the night, and at daybreak; but nothing out of the ordinary.
Two men on listening-post had been shot; and so had an overcurious sentry who peeped just an inch too far above a parapet. A shell had burst in a trench, knocking the telephone connection out of gear and half burying a squad of sleepers under a lot of earth. Otherwise, things were drowsily dull.
In a dugout sprawled Top-Sergeant Mahan,--formerly of Uncle Sam's regular army, playing an uninspiring game of poker with Sergeant Dale of his company and Sergeant Vivier of the French infantry.
The Frenchman was slow in learning poker's mysteries.
And, anyway, all three men were temporarily penniless and were forced to play for I.O.U's--which is stupid sport, at best.
So when, from the German line, came a quick sputt-sputt-sputt from a half-dozen sharpshooters' rifles, all three men looked up from their desultory game in real interest. Mahan got to his feet with a grunt.
"Some other fool has been trying to see how far he can rubber above the sandbags without drawing boche fire," he hazarded, starting out to investigate. "It's a miracle to me how a boche bullet can go through heads that are so full of first-quality ivory as those rubberers'."But Mahan's strictures were quite unwarranted. The sharpshooters were not firing at the parapet. Their scattering shots were flying high, and hitting against the slope of the hill behind the trenches.
Adown this shell--pocked hillside, as Mahan and the other disturbed idlers gazed, came cantering a huge dark-brown-and-white collie. The morning wind stirred the black stippling that edged his tawny fur, showing the gold-gray undercoat beneath it.
His white chest was like a snowdrift, and offered a fine mark for the German rifles. A bullet or two sang whiningly past his gayly up-flung head.
A hundred voices from the Here-We-Come trenches hailed the advancing dog.
"Why, it's Bruce!" cried Mahan in glad welcome. "I might 'a'
known he or another of the collies would be along. I might 'a'
known it, when the telephones went out of commission. He--""Regardez-donc!" interrupted the admiring Vivier. "He acts like bullets was made of flies! Mooch he care for boche lead-pills, ce brave vieux!""Yes," growled Dale worriedly; "and one of these days a bullet will find its way into that splendid carcass of his. He's been shot at, a thousand times, to my own knowledge. And all I ask is a chance, with a rifle-butt, at the skull of the Hun who downs him!""Downs Bruce?" queried Vivier in fine scorn. "The boche he is no borned who can do it. Bruce has what you call it, in Ainglish, the 'charm life.' He go safe, where other caniche be pepper-potted full of holes. I've watch heem. I know."Unscathed by the several shots that whined past him, Bruce came to a halt at the edge of a traverse. There he stood, wagging his plume of a tail in grave friendliness, while a score of khaki-clad arms reached up to lift him bodily into the trench.
A sergeant unfastened the message from the dog's collar and posted off to the colonel with it.
The message was similar to one which had been telephoned to each of the supporting bodies, to right and to left of the Here-We-Comes. It bade the colonel prepare to withdraw his command from the front trenches at nightfall, and to move back on the main force behind the hill-crest. The front trenches were not important; and they were far too lightly manned to resist a mass attack. Wherefore the drawing-in and consolidating of the whole outflung line.
Bruce, his work done now, had leisure to respond to the countless offers of hospitality that encompassed him. One man brought him a slice of cold broiled bacon. Another spread pork-grease over a bit of bread and proffered it. A third unearthed from some sacredly guarded hiding-place an excessively stale half-inch square of sweet chocolate.
