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whatever nightmare he’d been trapped in. “Come on,” she said, lifting him up. He acquiesced calmly, but she could feel the tremors through his arms. She led him towards the hut, distracting him every time he flinched or his eyes flicked towards the front line, muttering comforting maternal words as she led him step by step towards the relative safety of the hut, away from the clamour of the oncoming battle.
     
     
    F ROM THE FIRE trench, Lieutenant Everson scanned the alien army in his binoculars, chewing his lip. Every so often, the purple black of the huge slow larval beasts blotted out his view for a moment only for the advancing scentirrii to appear, as he continued his sweep, gnashing their mandibles and striking their chitinous thorax plates with their weapons.
    The men called those great beasts ‘battlepillars.’ They were twice as high as an elephant and twenty to thirty yards long, making up the vanguard of the chatt army. Purple and black in colour, with fearsome-looking yellow markings on their faces, their bodies were covered with chitinous sections covered with defensive spines. A rider stood behind each head in a howdah-type affair, a canopied box, reins running down to the battlepillars’ head and fixed in some manner to their mandibles. Along the beasts’ lengths were slung long boat-cradles carrying yet more Khungarrii scentirrii armed with electric lances. They may not have had tanks, but these beasts weren’t far off.
    And speaking of the tank, where the bloody hell was it? The Khungarrii thought it was some great demon or god of the dead or something. If the tank had been here they wouldn’t have dared attack. Or perhaps that was the point. Maybe they were attacking because it wasn’t here. Which meant they must have been watching all this time.
    Everson realised that there was the very real danger that the chatts would try to flank and surround the encampment. He would have to hit them hard and fast to dissuade them.
    He was depending on his machine guns. Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem – the field of fire from their emplacements covered the entire valley mouth – but their ammunition supplies were severely limited. He’d only have one good shot at this.
    Since the dwindling ammunitions reserves were rationed, and even he daren’t cross Company Quartermaster Sergeant Slacke, he had taken to wearing the dress sword that his father had bought for him. Although only ever meant for ceremonial use, it was, nonetheless, a real sword. He wasn’t looking forward to the day he would have to use it. He hoped it wouldn’t be today.
     
     
    C AUGHT IN THE poppy field, Atkins ordered his men to take up positions in front of the wire weed entanglements and find hasty cover, if they could.
    The Khungarrii battlepillars began to advance, crunching their way over tube grass. Behind the great warbeasts marched the first wave of the Khungarrii assault. Thankfully, they didn’t seem to possess any long-range weapons of any kind. Atkins and his section had their guns, but they’d been on patrol and in a skirmish.
    “Bugger!” muttered Mercy. “I’ve only got a magazine left.”
    Gazette glanced over and smiled grimly. “Better not miss, then.”
    Here they were again. Same old same old. It never changed. Atkins nodded back and shifted his attention to the great battlepillars that lumbered towards them.
    The wire weed behind them, he thought, was going to present as little problem to these creatures as Hun barbed wire did to their own tanks. In the pit of his stomach Atkins felt the same fear that the Huns must have felt when the tanks first came crawling out of the Somme mud towards them, crushing everything in their path.
    Behind them, he could see the first ranks of Khungarrii scentirrii begin to charge, their mandibles open.
    He felt his bowels churn.
    “This is it, lads,” he said gravely. “Pick your targets.”
    He could hear Nobby whimper and Prof’s soothing tone trying to