"Stay here and do as the lieutenant has shown you if they show their noses again," said the corporal, and Rabot took his post at the machine-gun.
The French soldier is intelligent because he has imagination, and Rabot understood. Corporal Puzzeau understood also, and his eyes danced as Dennis bounded along the top of the parados towards the retreating company.
They were bunched up in the trench, and some of them were even scrambling out over the other side, when that slim brown figure in the uniform of their British Allies with one of their own helmets on his head, and the corporal behind him, appeared above them.
"Comrades of the 400th of the Line!" cried Dennis. "You are surely not going back to Paris? Berlin lies in this direction. Follow me, and I will show you the way."
"Vive la patrie!" bellowed Corporal Puzzeau, and the men who had recoiled, took up the shout and scaled the wall of the parados again.
A furious rat-tat-tat sounded a little way off, and Dennis heard Puzzeau laugh.
"It is only Rabot," he said. "He has learnt the trick already."
In a few minutes the ground behind the German trench was strewn with bodies in field grey, and it was with some difficulty that Dennis and the corporal could check the victorious company from penetrating into the zone of their own artillery barrage fire. As it was, a good many of the helmets were dented, and not a few of the poilus paid the toll of their own eagerness.
"Mon lieutenant, if I return to our own lines," said the Alsatian corporal, "the general shall hear of this thing you have done. In the name of my country I thank you," and he held out his hand.
Dennis shook it, and laughed. "There is nothing to make a fuss about, corporal," he said. "We've taken the trench, anyhow; and as I see our right brigade yonder, who seem to have been lucky also, I think I'll get along now and join them."