The Germans were chained to the piece, and as he shot the last man of the gun crew, his brother officer overtook him.
At his heels A Company had arrived with a heartening roar, and jumped down on to the crowded mass in the trench below them, a perfect forest of arms going up as the demoralised runaways bellowed for mercy.
"Bravo, Hawke! Go it, boys!" shouted Dennis, almost overturning Wetherby.
"My hat!" exclaimed the boy, as they gripped each other to save falling into the tightly packed trench below them, "that was no end of a stunt of yours. If we hadn't shifted forward we should have been killed to a man. Hadn't left our position five minutes before their shells found us!"
"And I never knew you'd moved," said Dennis. "Look at those chaps bolting into that dug-out there! Give 'em a couple of bombs!"
Young Wetherby hurled two Mills grenades into an opening in the wall of the German parados, and the double explosion was followed by a chorus of piercing screams. As for the trench, it was piled up with bodies five and six deep, for the Prussians were sturdy men and fought like wild cats.
But already the Highland battalion on the Reedshires' left had come up. Other battalions away to the east were making good, and the brigade was carrying all before it.
"Forward!" rang the whistles, and, leaving the supports to consolidate, the leading battalions cleared the parados and pushed on.
It was a wild flounder over the sodden ground, three hundred yards of it, with shell-holes where the rain took you up to your armpits, but the Reedshires had tasted the glories of conquest, and there was no holding them back, if, indeed, anyone had wished to do so.
"Next stop, Berlin!" yelled Harry Hawke, tripping up as the words left his mouth, and sliding twice his own length to the edge of a crump-hole, into which another inch would have plunged him head foremost.