Never had the boys seen such a powerful looking car as that to which an orderly led them. Without the waste of a moment they climbed in—Lieutenant Mackinson, our three friends, young Hoskins and the towering Rawle. In another instant they were speeding across the country with the break of dawn.
But their trip now was far different from the one they had had across England. Where, in that country, they had seen big concentration camps, and men preparing for war, with an occasional evidence of war's effects in a building wrecked by a night air raid, here, in the eastern part of France, they came upon actual war in all its fateful progress, with whole towns demolished, forests and orchards blotted out—stark ruin written over the face of the earth.
With a clear right-of-way, their high-power machine swept past ammunition and food trains—long strings of powerful motor trucks driving toward the scene of action. They came upon towns and villages in that area known as "behind the lines," where French, American, Belgian and British soldiers were recuperating after hard days and nights in the front-line trenches.
By this time they were well within sound of the heavy guns, and their driver told them that the artillery duel then going on had been in progress for forty-eight hours at least.
"Sometimes it lasts for a week or more, you know," he said, "in preparation for a great infantry advance. But I understand that this time they expect to go forward before the end of to-day."
"Which, means," added Lieutenant Mackinson, "that we probably will get a chance to get right into the thick of it."
On and on they went, and nearer and nearer to the scene of actual battle they came. They passed the third-line trenches, and now, in places, they seemed to be in a straight line with some of the concealed artillery that was pounding away at the enemy in terrible detonations that shook and rocked the ground every minute.
At the second-line trenches their orders called for a halt. They did not have to be told that there was "something doing." The road, so far as the eye could reach backward over the route they had traveled, was a constantly moving line of motor trucks, coming forward with men and shells, while out ahead of them, tremendous and menacing, big tanks—the biggest things the boys ever had seen propelled on wheels or tractors—were pursuing their uneven course toward the front, in preparation for a new kind of assault.
"They look like miniature battleships on land, don't they?" exclaimed Slim.
The others agreed that it was about the best description that could be given of these massive fighting machines, equipped with guns and men, that could travel with their own power practically anywhere, across shell holes, over trenches, through barbed wire—the most human piece of war mechanism that had yet made its appearance on the battlefield.