FOOTNOTES:
[3] The Queen Elizabeth, under the British flag, the most powerful vessel at the opening of the war, carried eight 15-inch guns and sixteen 6-inch guns as an auxiliary battery.
[4] General Von Emmich's advance force, irrespective of reserves, was 120,000 men.
[5] This does not mean the trench of modern trench warfare, but the old-fashioned shallow rifle-pit.
[6] These figures are not official, but are careful estimates from known facts by leading artillerists of the Allies.
[CHAPTER III]
THE CAPTIVE KAISER
When, on the night of that first bombardment, Horace Monroe struck across the fields to take the river path homewards, the boy's spirit thrilled with a keen eagerness for the future. To his very finger-tips he seemed to be a-quiver with life. Action and the clacking blare of the cannonade heightened his sensations.
Death had come near to him but it had not made him afraid, rather it had given him a sense of exultation. He was still partly deaf from the shock of the shell-burst and to his memory was continually returning the scene of Deschamps lying on the Embourg road, the blood trickling from his forehead.
"It's hard luck for Deschamps, though," he muttered to himself, "to be put out of everything, without even having seen the fighting!"