“I can do it.” Hugo smiled. “And you’ve lost so many of your own men—”

“Very well.”

Otto Meyer pushed his helmet back on his sandy-haired head and gasped in the feverish air. A non-commissioned officer passing behind him shoved the helmet over his eyes with a muttered word of caution. Otto shrugged. Half a dozen men lounged near by. Beside and above them were the muzzles of four squat guns and the irregular silhouette of a heap of ammunition. Two of the men rolled onto their backs and panted. “I wish,” one said in a soft voice, “that I was back in the Hofbrau at Munich with a tall stein of beer, with that fat Fräulein that kissed me in the Potsdam station last September sitting at my side and the orchestra playing—”

Otto flung a clod of dank earth at the speaker. There were chuckles from the shadows that sucked in and exhaled the rancid air. Outside the pit in which they lay, there was a gentle thud.

Otto scrambled into a sitting posture. “What is that?”

“Nothing. Even these damned English aren’t low enough to fight us in this weather.”

“You can never tell. At night, in the first battle of—listen!”

The thud was repeated, much closer. It was an ominous sound, like the drop of a sack of earth from a great height. Otto picked up a gun. He was a man who perspired freely, and now, in that single minute, his face trickled. He pointed the gun into the air and pulled the trigger. It kicked back and jarred his arm. In the glaring light that followed, six men peered through the spider-web of the wire. They saw nothing.

“You see?”

Their eyes smarted with the light and dark, so swiftly exchanged. Came a thud in their midst. A great thud that spattered the dirt in all directions. “Something has fallen.” “A shell!” “It’s a dud!”

The men rose and tried to run. Otto had regained his vision and saw the object that had descended. A package of yellow sticks tied to a great mass of iron—wired to it. Instead of running, he grasped it. His strength was not enough to lift it. Then, for one short eternity, he saw a sizzling spark move toward the sticks. He clutched at it. “Help! The guns must be saved. A bomb!” He knew his arms surrounded death. “I cannot—”

His feeble voice was blown to the four winds at that instant. A terrible explosion burst from him, shattering the escaping men, blasting the howitzers into fragments, enlarging the pit to enormous dimensions. Both fronts clattered with machine-gun fire. Flares lit the terrain. Hugo, running as if with seven-league boots, was thrown on his face by the concussion.