Ken and his two chums needed no second order.  They simply pitched themselves down, and no one ever slept better on a spring mattress than Ken did in the muddy bottom of that trench.

What woke him at last was a crash which made the solid hill-side quiver, and dwarfed to insignificance anything that he had previously heard.

In a flash he was up and on his feet.

‘Go aisy, lad,’ said O’Brien, who was standing up, with a pair of glasses to his eyes and a smile on his lips.  Go aisy.  ’Tis only Lizzie opening the ball.’

‘Lizzie?’ muttered Ken, still half dazed with the prodigious explosion.

Again came an enormous roar, followed by a sound like a train rushing through the sky.  Then from a hill to the left and a mile or so inland a geyser of rocks and soil spouted, and was followed by the same earth-shaking crash which had wakened him.

Ken looked out to sea.  Some three miles off shore lay the biggest battleship he had ever set eyes on.  Even at that distance her immense turrets, with their grinning gun muzzles, were clearly visible.

‘The “Queen Elizabeth!"’ he gasped.

‘That’s what,’ said Roy Horan, who had got up and joined Ken.  ’They’ve sent her along to lend us a hand.  Oh, I tell you, she’s no slouch.  Watch her now!  Gee, but she’s giving Young Turkey something to chew on.’

‘Why, there’s a regular fleet!’ exclaimed Ken, rubbing the last of the sleep from his eyes.  ’This is something like.  Some of those sniping gentlemen are going to be sorry for themselves.’

No fewer than seven warships were lying off the coast, every one of them smashing their broadsides into the Turkish positions.  The noise was incredible, but every sound was dwarfed when the great super-Dreadnought fired her 15-inch guns.  The shells, the length of a tall man and weighing very nearly a ton, were charged with shrapnel, carrying no fewer than twenty thousand bullets apiece.  Exploding over the enemy’s position, each deluged a couple of acres of ground with a torrent of lead.

[Illustration:  ’"’Tis only Lizzie opening the ball."’]

It was a most amazing sight.  The whole sky was full of the smoke of bursting shells—­smoke so heavy that the light breeze could not break it, as it swam in masses that seemed quite solid until they struck against the higher ground far inland.

Hour after hour the tremendous bombardment continued.  At first the Turkish field pieces endeavoured to reply, but one by one they were silenced, and when at last, late in the afternoon, the thunder of the guns ceased, the silence was only broken by a faint crackle of musketry.

‘Now’s our chance!’ exclaimed O’Brien, who seemed to have an uncanny faculty for understanding beforehand exactly what was in the colonel’s mind.

‘A charge, you mean?’ said Ken eagerly.

’That’s it, sonny.  Before they’ve got over the effects of that swate little pasting.’