“Yes, I think so.  Little is directing his platoons from a convenient cellar.  He was in touch with them all when I left.  But it is possible that the Boche may make a rush when it grows a bit lighter.  At present he is too demoralised to attempt anything beyond intermittent machine-gun fire.”

Colonel Kemp turned to Cockerell.

“Get Captain Little on the telephone,” he said, “and tell him, if the enemy displays any disposition to counter-attack, to let me know at once.”  Then he turned to Wagstaffe, and asked the question which always lurks furtively on the tongue of a commanding officer.

“Many—­casualties?”

“‘A’ Company have caught it rather badly crossing the open.  ‘B’ got off lightly.  Glen is commanding them now:  Waddell was killed leading his men in the rush to the final objective.”

Colonel Kemp sighed.

“Another good boy gone—­veteran, rather.  I must write to his wife.  Fairly newly married, I fancy?”

“Four months,” said Wagstaffe briefly.

“What was his Christian name, do you know?”

“Walter, I think, sir,” said Cockerell.

Colonel Kemp, amid the stress of battle, found time to enter a note in his pocket-diary to that effect.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, up in the line, ‘A’ Company were holding on grimly to what are usually described as “certain advanced elements” of the village.

Village fighting is a confused and untidy business, but it possesses certain redeeming features.  The combatants are usually so inextricably mixed up that the artillery are compelled to refrain from participation.  That comes later, when you have cleared the village of the enemy, and his guns are preparing the ground for the inevitable counter-attack.

So far ‘A’ Company had done nobly.  From the moment when they had lined up before Montauban in the gross darkness preceding yesterday’s dawn until the moment when Bobby Little led them in one victorious rush into the outskirts of the village, they had never encountered a setback.  By sunset they had penetrated some way farther; now creeping stealthily forward under the shelter of a broken wall to hurl bombs into the windows of an occupied cottage; now climbing precariously to some commanding position in order to open fire with a Lewis gun; now making a sudden dash across an open space.  Such work offered peculiar opportunities to small and well-handled parties—­opportunities of which Bobby Little’s veterans availed themselves right readily.

Angus M’Lachlan, for instance, accompanied by a small following of seasoned experts, had twice rounded up parties of the enemy in cellars, and had despatched the same back to Headquarters with his compliments and a promise of more.  Mucklewame and four men had bombed their way along a communication trench leading to one of the side streets of the village—­a likely avenue for a counter-attack—­and having reached the end of the trench, had built up a sandbag barricade, and had held the same against the assaults of hostile bombers until a Vickers machine-gun had arrived in charge of an energetic subaltern of that youthful but thriving organisation, the Suicide Club, or Machine-Gun Corps, and closed the street to further Teutonic traffic.