Presently, now, having eaten all he wanted and having been patted
and talked to until he craved solitude, Bruce strolled ever to an
empty dugout, curled up on a torn blanket there, put his nose
between his white paws and went to sleep.

The German artillery-fire had swelled from an occasional
explosion to a ceaseless roar, that made the ground vibrate and
heave, and that beat on the eardrums with nauseating iterance.
But it did not bother Bruce. For months he had been used to this
sort of annoyance, and he had learned to sleep snugly through it
all.

Meanwhile, outside his dugout, life was speeding up at a dizzying
rate. The German artillery had sprung to sudden and wholesale
activity. Far to the right of the Here-We-Come regiment's
trenches a haze had begun to crawl along the ground and to send
snaky tendrils high in air-tendrils that blended into a single
grayish-green wall as they moved forward. The hazewall's gray-
green was shot by yellow and purple tinges as the sun's weak rays
touched it. To the left of the Here-We-Comes, and then in front
of them, appeared the same wall of billowing gas.

The Here-We-Comes were ready for it with their hastily donned
masks. But there was no need of the precaution. By one of the
sudden wind--freaks so common in the story of the war, the gas-
cloud was cleft in two by a swirling breeze, and it rolled dankly
on, to right and left, leaving the central trenches clear.

Now, an artillery barrage, accompanied or followed by a gas-
demonstration, can mean but one thing: a general attack.