was getting on, and the few fellows with them, on his defensive flank.
The bombs were going off thick. All the Daleswood men were firing half
right. It sounded from the noise as if it couldn't last long, as if it
would soon be decisive, and the battle be won, or lost, just there on
the right, and perhaps the war ended. They didn't notice the left.
Nothing to speak of.

``Then a runner came from the left. `Hullo!' they said, `How are
things over there?'

```The Boche is through,' he said. `Where's the officer?' `Through!'
they said. It didn't seem possible. However did he do that? they
thought. And the runner went on to the right to look for the officer.

``And then the barrage shifted further back. The shells still screamed
over them, but the bursts were further away. That is always a relief.
Probably they felt it. But it was bad for all that. Very bad. It meant
the Boche was well past them. They realized it after a while.

``They and their bit of wire were somehow just between two waves of
attack. Like a bit of stone on the beach with the sea coming in. A
platoon was nothing to the Boche; nothing much perhaps just then to
anybody. But it was the whole of Daleswood for one long generation.

``The youngest full-grown man they had left behind was fifty, and some
one had heard that he had died since the war. There was no one else in
Daleswood but women and children, and boys up to seventeen.

``The bombing had stopped on their right; everything was quieter, and
the barrage further away. When they began to realize what that meant