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canteen, entrenching tool and eating equipment. The rest he set aside to dispose of at the first opportunity.
    It was an opportunity that he didn't get. They were marched to the town of Mons where the French Fifth Army was locked in a losing struggle with superior German forces. They marched along country roads lined with trees beside fields and farmhouses. The soldiers occupied the center of the road, and both sides were jammed with French refugees, as many heading for the German border as were heading away from it. Most of the groups consisted of a stout farmer in the lead – blond, blue-eyed ones heading north, swarthy ones moving south. Behind the farmer came a high-laden, horse-drawn dray hauling everything of value that could be carried – brass beds, barrels of wine, furniture, perhaps a plow, a butter churn. Behind the dray came numerous children and women, all carrying as much as they were able to bear.
    The over-laden British troops arrived on the outskirts of the town as darkness fell and had to set up camp in the open, blundering around by lamplight.
    At dawn the next morning they moved into some empty French trenches while their twenty-four pieces of artillery were dragged about and eventually aimed at the German lines.
    The hastily set up British guns were too far away, too small, and too few to have any real effect other than to alert the Germans that an attack was imminent.
    At eight o'clock, in broad daylight, the Tommies climbed out of the trenches, each man hampered by his enormous pack and accoutrements. Second lieutenants with wire cutters opened narrow passages through the giant sausages of barbed wire, and they stumbled forward into a hail of artillery bombardment accompanied by withering machine gun fire. The tracer rounds from the machine guns made long lines of white light as they reached for the British troops.
    Stooped almost double, they ran into the rain of lead.
    To Casca's right a Highland division was advancing, led by a group of young boys in kilts playing bagpipes and drums. Behind these boys came the subalterns, only slightly older and armed only with swagger sticks and holstered pistols.
    The German trenches were only four hundred yards away, and the intervening ground had been churned up by constant French and German artillery fire for the past ten days so that now it looked like the surface of the moon.
    Casca stumbled at the lip of a shell crater and fell into it, rolling down the slope to come to rest in the bottom pinned by his heavy pack. He struggled up and saw that he shared the crater with two corpses, one German, one French, and both stinking. He shrugged his way out of his pack and abandoned it then climbed the far slope of the crater and paused to survey the scene of action.
    All around him men were dying, blown to bits by shells, or cut in half by machine gun fire. Second lieutenants with swagger sticks were pacing back and forth exhorting the men to advance. Here and there a few Tommies would clamber out of a crater and run forward to be torn to pieces in the fire storm, and every few moments one or the other of the subalterns would fall.
    A lieutenant passed close to Casca's crater, a boy of perhaps eighteen, his muddied pink cheeks streaked with tears, his swagger stick waving urgently as he called for another charge.
    Casca, cursing himself for a fool, rose to his feet and ran until only Casca and the lieutenant were on their feet. And then Casca was alone.
    The enemy trenches were only a hundred yards away when Casca fell again. He lay still, staring at the barbed wire entanglement that topped the German trenches.
    Every few yards along the trench there was a machine gun, and all of them were spitting flame in his direction. Around him British troops were either hugging the ground as he was or screaming out their lives in messes of blood and lead and dirt.
    The last of the officers seemed to have died or perhaps had learned enough to keep down. Only the Highlanders over