He was not the only man to be writing to his mother at this moment and to judge by the tense quietness of his companions and the uneasy chewing of fountain pens, he was not alone in finding the letter difficult to phrase. For some days now they had all guessed that a big new offensive was imminent. No one was anxious to put his suspicions into words in case they should be confirmed, but Robert had drawn his own conclusions from the number of Decauville railway tracks which he and his section had laid in the past three weeks and the weight of ammunition which had been hauled along them. The tramp of men moving forward along newly surfaced roads had told its own story. So too had the piles of wooden crosses waiting ready in the villages behind the lines and only partly concealed by coverings of torn tarpaulin. That afternoon the orders which they had all been expecting had come at last. After almost two years of war, officers and men alike knew the odds against them. Robert calculated that his cousin, Brinsley Lorimer, who was in the front line and would be one of the first to go over the top, had less than one chance in four of surviving the next day and only one chance in three of emerging from it unhurt.
