“No doubt we shall be able to confirm the rumour to-morrow,” 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.  Further 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 right-angled 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 northwest.  “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 to-morrow’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. Voila 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 thirty feet deep.  When crumped by our artillery he withdraws his infantry and leaves his machine-gunners behind, safe underground.  Then, when our guns lift and the attack comes over, his machine-gunners appear on the surface, hoist their guns after them with a sort of tackle arrangement, and get to work on a prearranged band of fire.  The infantry can’t do them in until No Man’s Land is crossed, and—­well, they don’t all get across, that’s all!  However, I have heard rumours—­”