Page:War, the Liberator (1918).djvu/153

 sang within him. It was all right. It was properly timed. He glanced at his watch, and nudged the men on each side of him.

“Pass along, ‘Three minutes to go, get ready,’” he yelled—no need to whisper now—and into his mind came a picture of his boat on the Isis on a sunny day, and the coach on the bank counting the seconds to the starting gun. He laughed at the queer similarity.

“Half a minute more,” he passed along, and watched the seconds ticking past. Then all at once he climbed up, and, for a second or two, stood alone on the crater lip. “Come along, boys,” he said quietly, and the raiding party poured after him out across the open.

As he ran across the shell-torn No Man’s Land a strange exultation came over him. It was the same ground that he had crawled through painfully night after night, but seen in the daylight it was different and very thrilling. But what a devil of a long way it was—much farther than he had thought. Where was the damned trench? Surely it wasn’t so far as all that.

Suddenly it yawned before him, and he saw at his feet a few scattered posts, and some strands of broken wire. A huge relief took possession of him, as he threw away his wire-cutters,