In subdued voices the officers were now counselling their men to use all reasonable precaution; and indeed the orders were necessary, for the lads, now this far upon their errand of victory, were ready to plunge ahead, regardless of all hazards.
And then in another instant the whole thing was on. Tom did not hear the order given. As he thought the thing over afterward, he wondered if any actual order had been uttered. It was a matter of doubt, not only with himself, but with many other of the men. But after all that was a matter of only secondary moment.
They were in—those men in the first wave of shock companies—and now they were racing like mad toward where the enemy lay waiting.
They were within fifty yards of the wood which was their immediate objective when they suddenly were made aware that it was a veritable wasp’s nest of hidden machine guns. With disconcerting unison they began to spit their bullets at the American lines, and the men, trained to just such a contingency, fell flat upon their stomachs with such alacrity that none could tell which or how many had been killed or wounded by this first defense of the hidden Huns.
The machine guns continued their murderous sput-sput-sput, but the range was over the heads of the men as they stealthily edged forward, now in scattered, zig-zag line.
Tom saw George Harper train his gun upon the thick foliage of a near tree, and, almost on the instant that he fired, a huge German came toppling through the branches and to the ground.
“Number one,” Harper muttered, with set jaw. But another sharp-shooter had picked him out, and he had hardly said the words when a bullet flattened itself against his helmet with such force as to drive it down over his eyes.
A sergeant crawled past where Tom and Ollie were scraping their way forward. “I want three men to go with me to get that nearest machine gun nest,” he whispered, “you two come along.”
As Tom and Ollie followed as cautiously as they could, they realized that the third man was their old friend, “Buck” Granger. “A little action at last,” he grumbled, good-naturedly, as he wiped from his eye a chunk of dirt that had been thrown up by a bullet which plowed into the ground less than a foot ahead of him. “This is the real stuff.”
The sergeant warned them to be careful not to raise their voices. They were making their way through a patch of tall weeds and grass, and the object was to move as rapidly as possible, and yet with every caution, so that they might overtake the nest without themselves being discovered.