Far away, in another section of the trenches, there was a burst of cheering. Major Hilton pricked up his ears to listen; but it was drowned immediately in another blast outside that sealed the mouth of the dugout like a blow from a gigantic hammer and plunged them into complete darkness thick with dust and sand.
"Are you all right?" said Hilton, in a moment or two. "They've blown the parapet over us. Our chaps will soon get us out."
They sat down and waited. The sound of their rescuers' shovels was followed almost immediately by the pulling away of a sandbag, and the dusty daylight filtered in again, bringing with it another roar of cheering, nearer now, and rolling along the trenches like an Atlantic breaker.
"What the hell are they shouting about?" Hilton grunted, as he scrambled through the opening. May Margaret was about to follow him, when the abrupt answer struck her motionless.
"Yes, sir. They are passing the President's message along the line. It looks as if they mean business."
May Margaret had moved further back into the darkness of the dugout. She was breathing quickly, panting like a thirsty dog. She dropped on her knees by an old packing-case in the corner.
"Thank God. Thank God," she repeated, with her eyes shut. Then the tears came, and her whole body shook.
A hand touched her shoulder. She rose to her feet and saw the bewildered face of Major Hilton, peering again at her own.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's the first time I've done it since I was a kid; but I've been hoping for this ever since the beginning. It's my country, you see."
"I've just been looking at the President's message," said Hilton. "I'm an Englishman, but--if a democracy can discipline itself--I'm not sure that yours won't be the greatest country in the world. I suppose it must be, or the Lord wouldn't have entrusted so much to you. He gave you the best that we ever had to give, and that was our Englishman, George Washington; and the best thing that George Washington ever did, was to fight the German King and his twenty thousand Hessians. Eh, what?"
It was a little after dusk when the unexpected happened. There had been a lull in the bombardment; and, on Major Hilton's advice, May Margaret was resting in the dugout in readiness for the long wakeful night of the trenches.