The first line of barbed wire was cut and passed.  Then followed an endless groping progress across No Man’s Land, and several delays, as one man or another had trouble in finding contact with his neighbor.

At last the party came to the German wires.  The lieutenant had drawn on a rubber glove.  In his gloved hand he grasped a strip of steel which he held in front of him, like a wand, fanning the air with it.

As he came to the entanglement, he probed the barbed wire carefully with his wand, watching for an ensuing spark.  For the Germans more than once had been known to electrify their wires, with fatal results to luckless prowlers.

These wires, to-night, were not charged.  And, with pliers, the lieutenant and Mahan started to cut a passageway through them.

As the very first strand parted under his pressure, Mahan laid one hand warningly on the lieutenant’s sleeve, and then passed the same prearranged warning down the line to the left.

Silence—­moveless, tense, sharply listening silence—­followed his motion.  Then the rest of the party heard the sound which Mahan’s keener ears had caught a moment earlier—­the thud of many marching feet.  Here was no furtive creeping, as when the twelve Yankees had moved along.  Rather was it the rhythmic beat of at least a hundred pairs of shapeless army boots—­perhaps of more.  The unseen marchers were moving wordlessly, but with no effort at muffling the even tread of their multiple feet.

“They’re coming this way!” breathed Sergeant Mahan almost without sound, his lips close to the excited young lieutenant’s ear.  “And they’re not fifty paces off.  That means they’re boches.  So near the German wire, our men would either be crawling or else charging, not marching!  It’s a company—­maybe a battalion—­coming back from a reconnaissance, and making for a gap in their own wire some where near here.  If we lay low there’s an off chance they may pass us by.”

Without awaiting the lieutenant’s order, Mahan passed along the signal for every man to drop to earth and lie there.  He all but forced the eagerly gesticulating lieutenant to the ground.

On came the swinging tread of the Germans.  Mahan, listening breathlessly, tried to gauge the distance and the direction.  He figured, presently, that the break the Germans had made in their wire could be only a few yards below the spot where he and the lieutenant had been at work with the pliers.  Thus the intruders, from their present course, must inevitably pass very close to the prostrate Americans—­so close, perhaps, as to brush against the nearest of them, or even to step on one or more of the crouching figures.

Mahan whispered to the man on his immediate left, the rookie from Missouri: 

“Edge closer to the wire—­close as you can wiggle, and lie flat.  Pass on the word.”

The Missourian obeyed.  Before writhing his long body forward against the bristly mass of wire he passed the instructions on to the man at his own left.