With the rest of the line No. 2 Platoon was painfully moving from its cramped position and trying to stamp and shake the circulation back into its stiffened limbs, when there came a sudden series of swishing rushes and sharp vicious cracks overhead, and ripping thuds of shrapnel across and across the trench. The burst of fire from the light guns was excellently timed. Their high velocity and flat trajectory landed the shells on their mark without any of the whistling rush of approach that marked the bigger shells and gave time to duck into any available cover. The one gust of light shells caught a full dozen men—as many as the half-hour's work of the big guns.
Then the heavies opened again as accurately as before and twice as fast. The trench began to yawn in wide holes, and its sides to crumble and collapse. No. 2 Platoon occupied a portion of the trench that ran out in a blunted angle, and it caught the worst of the fire. One shell falling just short of the front parapet dug a yawning hole and drove in the forward wall of the trench in a tumbled slide of mud and earth. A dug-out and the two men occupying it were completely buried, and the young officer scurried and pushed along to the place shouting for spades. A party fell to work with frantic haste; but all their energy was wasted. The occupants of the buried dug-out were dead when at last the spades found them . . . and broken finger-nails and bleeding finger-tips told a grisly tale of the last desperate struggle for escape and for the breath of life. The officer covered the one convulsed face and starting eyes with his handkerchief, and a private placed a muddy cap over the other.
'Get back to your places and get down,' said the officer quietly, and the men crawled back and crouched low again. For a full hour the line lay under the flail of the big shells that roared and shrieked overhead and thundered crashing along the trenches. For a full hour the men barely moved, except to shift along from a spot where the shaken and crumbling parapet gave insufficient cover from the hailing shrapnel that poured down at intervals, and from the bullets that swept in and smacked venomously into the back of the trench through the shell-rifts in the parapet.
A senior officer made his way slowly along the sodden and quaking trench. He halted beside the young officer and spoke to him a few minutes, asking what the casualties were and hoping vaguely 'they would ease off presently.'
'Can't our own guns do anything?' asked the youngster; 'or won't they let us get out and have a go at them?'
The senior nodded towards the bare stretch of muddy plough before their trench, and the tangle of barbed wire beyond.
'How many men d'you suppose would get there?' he asked.
'Some would,' said the youngster eagerly, 'and anything would be better than sticking here and getting pounded to pieces.'
'We'll see,' said the major moving off. 'They may ask us to try it presently. And if not we'll pull through, I dare say. See that the men keep down, and keep down yourself, Grant. Watch out for a rush through. This may be a preparation for something of the sort.'
He moved along, and the lad flattened himself again against the side of the wet trench.