October. Ensconced in their comfortably-arranged trenches with but
a thin outpost in their fire trenches, they had watched day succeed
day and night succeed night without the least variation from the
monotony of trench warfare, the intermittent bark of the machine
guns--rat-tat-tat-tat-tat--and the perpetual rattle of rifle fire,
with here and there a bomb, and now and then an exploded mine.

[Illustration: _Illustrated London News_.

CHARGING THROUGH BARBED WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS

In one sector at Givenchy, the wire had not been sufficiently smashed by
the artillery preparation and the infantry attack was held up in the
face of a murderous German fire.]

"For weeks past the German airmen had grown strangely shy. On this
Wednesday morning none were aloft to spy out the strange doings
which, as dawn broke, might have been descried on the desolate
roads behind the British lines.

"From ten o'clock of the preceding evening endless files of men
marched silently down the roads leading towards the German
positions through Laventie and Richebourg St. Vaast, poor shattered
villages of the dead where months of incessant bombardment have
driven away the last inhabitants and left roofless houses and rent
roadways....

"Two days before, a quiet room, where Nelson's Prayer stands on the
mantel-shelf, saw the ripening of the plans that sent these sturdy
sons of Britain's four kingdoms marching all through the night. Sir