Grapes of wrath

by Boyd Cable

Here the enemy made a determined stand, and Larry instantly realized that, with his weak force, he had pushed his attack to the limit of safety. He left a couple of men there to keep the enemy in clay for a few minutes with a show of pressing the attack with persistent bombing, and hurried the others back to a point that offered the best chance of making a stand.

He chose a short, straight stretch of trench running into a wide and deep pit blown out by one of our heavy shells. Round the edge of this shell-crater pit ran a ready-made parapet thrown up by the explosion, and forming a barricade across the two points where the trench ran in and out of it.

Man by man, Larry pointed out to his little force the spot each was to occupy, and bade him dig in for his life to make cover against the bombing that would assuredly be their portion very soon. He himself crawled up on to the open to some uprooted barbed wire he had noticed, was dragging together all the tangled strands and stakes he could move, when he noticed a rusty reel of wire, half unwound, grabbed that, and shuffled back into the trench.

A shrill whistle brought his two outposts hurrying and hobbling in, one of them wounded in the leg by a grenade fragment, the other with a clean bullet wound through his forearm.

The barbed wire was hastily unreeled and piled in loose coils and loops and tangles in the straight bit of trench through which the Germans must come at the pit, while from the pit barricade one man tossed a grenade at intervals over the heads of the workers into the section of trench beyond them. But the wiring job had to be left incomplete when the arrival of two or three grenades gave warning of the coming attack, and Larry and the others scrambled hurriedly over the barricade parapet into the pit.

For the next ten minutes a hot fight—small in point of the numbers engaged and space covered, but savage in its intensity and speed—raged round the pit. The Germans tried first to force their way through by sheer weight of bombing. But the Stonewalls had made full use of their trenching tools and any scattered sandbags they could pick up, and had made very good cover for themselves. Each man was dug into a niche round the inside of the parapet from which he could look out either over the open ground or back into the pit.

The Germans showered grenades over into the wired trench and the pit, and followed their explosions with a rush for the barricade. Larry, with one man to either side of him, behind the pit rim where it blocked the trench, stopped the rush with half-a-dozen well-placed Mills’ grenades.

Almost at once the enemy copied the Stonewalls’ first plan of attack, and, climbing suddenly from their trench, made to run along the top and in on the defense. But their plan failed where Larry’s had succeeded, simply because Larry had provided its counter by placing a man to keep a lookout, and others where they could open a prompt rifle-fire from the cover of the pit’s parapet. The attack broke under the rapid fire that met them, and the uninjured Germans scuttled back into their trench.

A fresh bombing rush was tried, and this time pushed home, in spite of the grenades that met it and filled the trench bottom with a grewsome débris of mangled men, fallen earth, and torn wire. At the end the rush was only stopped at the very parapet by Larry and his two fellows standing up and emptying their rifle magazines into the men who still crowded into the shambles trench, tearing a way through the wire and treading their own dead under foot.

More of the Stonewalls were wounded by fragments of the grenades which each man of the attackers carried and threw over into the pit before him, and one man was killed outright at the parapet by Larry’s side. He was left with only four effective fighting men, and, what was worse, his stock of grenades was almost exhausted.