Publisher's Synopsis
The rain fell in torrents over the great battlefield, as Hal Paine and Chester Crawford, taking advantage of the inky blackness of the night, crept from the shelter of the American trenches that faced the enemy across "No Man's Land." In the trenches themselves all was silence. To a spectator it would have seemed that the occupants were, either dead or asleep; yet such was not the case. It is true that most of the men had "turned in" for the night, sleeping on their arms, for there was no means of telling at what moment the enemy might issue from his trenches in another of the night raids that had marked this particular sector for the last few weeks; but the ever vigilant sentinels stood watch over the sleeping men. They would sound an alarm, should occasion demand, in ample time to arouse the sleepers if an enemy's head appeared in the darkness. Hal and Chester, of course, left the American trenches with full knowledge of these sentinels; otherwise they might have been shot. Once beyond the protecting walls of earth, they moved swiftly and silently toward the German trenches less than a hundred feet away-just the distance from the home plate to first base on a baseball diamond, as Hal put it-ninety feet.
