"What hit us, anyway? Are the Germans attacking?"

"Gee!" was Bob's muttered protest.

"Get up!" some one cried. "You're all right. It was a bomb from a Hun plane, but it missed its mark."

"Seems to have hit me all right," observed Ned, whose face was bleeding, though only from scratches.

"You were knocked down by the concussion," explained the officer who had told them to get up. "It was a close call all right, but no one is hurt. Fall in for roll call!"

Ned, Bob, Jerry, and some of the other soldiers scrambled to their feet. They had been on the point of answering roll call when the explosion came, and now that the danger was over, at least for the time being, they had a chance to see what had caused it.

The aeroplane from which the bomb had been dropped was not now in sight, but this is what had happened. One of the German machines passing over the front line, as they often did, had escaped the Allied craft, and had also managed to pass through the firing of the anti-aircraft guns. Whether the machine had gone some distance back, hoping to drop bombs on an ammunition dump, or whether it came over merely to take a pot shot at the American trenches, was never known.

But the aviator had dropped a large explosive bomb, which, luckily for the Motor Boys and their comrades, had fallen into an open space, though not far from one of the camouflaged stations where the soldiers were quartered before being taken up to the front-line trenches. The explosion had blown a big hole in the ground and damaged some food stores, but that was all, except that when the Americans were about to answer roll call they were knocked down by the concussion, and some, like Ned, were scratched and cut by flying dirt and stones, or perhaps by fragments of the bursting bomb.

"See, no one is hurt," went on the officer, as if to reassure those who were soon to take their places in the front-line trenches. "Good luck was with you that time."

"I hope it keeps up," murmured Bob. "It's a mean trick to shoot a man before he has his breakfast," and then he wondered why the others laughed.

They all looked curiously, and it may be said, thankfully, at the big hole made by the bomb. As the officer had said, only good luck had prevented some of the boys from filling that hole.

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