"Guess the Hun wants to win back the line the British and French took from him in the Somme offensive," Jim said. "You see, he was lying then just east of Albert and pretty nigh within easy shot of Amiens; then he got pushed back right away past Fricourt and Pozières and other historical places, till his line was so broken and his defences so upset that he made a forced retirement after the battle was over, clearing out of Bapaume, Peronne, and Noyon to mention a few of the places. It must have shook him up a little that offensive of our allies, and if he's made up his mind to recapture the ground, well it ain't wonderful."
"Not when you come to remember the fact that the Russians are out of this business altogether," declared Larry with a curl of his lip; for somehow or other the downfall of the great Muscovite nation, the refusal of the soldiers there to fight, and the upheaval and revolution which had undermined the strength of the country, roused something like contempt. "There ain't no longer need for Germans in the east nor for Austrians either; a few battalions marching here and there are quite enough to occupy the country and to bully and overawe the people. Meanwhile the Kaiser is moving every man-jack he can find into France. Folks says that the railways are worn-out with transporting guns and men; and yonder, just over there"—and standing up the diminutive Larry stretched out a hand to the country beyond Peronne, where the German lines were—"somewhere yonder there are masses of the enemy, masses of guns too, I dare say, thousands of gas shells, trench mortars, bombs, and every sort of implement, all being stored and made ready for the day when the Germans will fling themselves upon Britons and French and Belgians and Americans, not to mention Portuguese and others who are fighting on the Western Front. It will be a terrific combat."
Yet days went by, settled weather arrived, and the end of March was already approaching. Those were days of beautiful sunlight, when men began to think of throwing off the hairy waistcoats with which the British soldier is provided, when greatcoats were discarded during the daytime, and when men sniffed at the breeze, scented the spring flowers, and thought of summer. But at night cold winds played over the ground, and the earth, in which so many thousands were living, dug deeply into it, struck chill and cold, and, as the early hours of morning came, condensed the moisture. Then the country-side was obscured in damp, wet fog, which hid the combatants from one another, hid, indeed, all but the sound of guns, which thundered here and there along the battle line.
For days past, indeed, gun-fire had been a feature along the front; it broke out here and there with violence; it subsided, perhaps, only to burst into double fury at an adjacent point; while for some hours now the enemy artillery had been thudding over a wide stretch, and the Allied guns had been answering shot for shot, so that there was pandemonium. Then, in the early hours of the 21st March, German masses were suddenly launched through the dense fog which still clad the country-side, and threw themselves with desperate fury upon the British Third and Fifth Armies.
CHAPTER XII Germany's Greatest Effort
It was cold and raw as Bill put his head up from the dug-out where he and his chums had their head-quarters.
"Something doin'," he said laconically, bobbing down again and clambering to the depths below, where in 1915 the Germans had dug hard to prepare a defensive line which would arrest the British forces.
Yet that contemptible force, as the Kaiser had arrogantly called it, swollen to unwonted proportions, had overrun this line in spite of strenuous German resistance, and here, in March, 1918, in place of the Hun enjoying such comfort as these dug-outs provided—here were Bill and his friends snug under cover.