The end looked very near, but it was staved off a little longer by the return of one of the severely wounded men that Larry had sent back in search of help, dragging a heavy box of German stick-grenades. Nobody knew how to use these. Each grenade had a head about the size and shape of a 1-lb. jam tin attached to a wooden handle a foot long. There was no sign of any pin to pull out or any means of detonating the grenade, but Larry noticed that the end of the handle was metal-tipped and finished off with a disc with notched edges.
A quick trial showed that this unscrewed and revealed a cavity in the handle and a short, looped length of string coiled inside. Some rapid and rather risky experiments proved that a pull on the string exploded some sort of cap and started a fuse, which in turn detonated the grenade in a few seconds.
“Neat,” said Harvey, the bomber. “Bloomin’ neat; though I don’t say as it beats the old Mills’. But, anyhow, we’re dash lucky to have ’em. ’Ere they come again, Larry!”
“Sock it in,” said Larry briefly. “There’s more bombs than we’ll have time to use, I fancy, so don’t try’n save them up.” He shouted orders for any of the wounded that could move themselves to clear out, and set himself to tossing over the grenades as fast as he could pull the detonating-strings.
Then his last man on the lookout on the pit rim yelled a warning and opened rapid fire, and Larry knew that another rush was coming over the open. That, he knew, was the finish, because now he had no men left to keep up a fire heavy enough to stop the rush above ground, and, if Harvey and he went to help, the ceasing of their grenade-throwing would leave the attack to come at him along the shattered trench.
He and Harvey looked once at each other, and went on grimly throwing grenades. Then Harvey dropped without a word, and Larry, looking up, saw a few Germans shooting over the pit rim. They disappeared suddenly as he looked, cut down—although he did not know that—by a heavy rifle-fire that had been opened by the British-owned trench behind him.
He yelled hoarsely at the one man left still firing from his niche up on the parapet, grabbed the box with the remaining grenades, and made a bolt across the pit for the other side and the trench opening from it. The rifleman did the same, but he fell half-way across, and Larry, reaching cover, glanced round and saw the other struggling to his knees, turned and dashed back, and half dragged, half carried the man across, up the crumbling edge of the pit, and heaved him over into the trench mouth. Then he took up his position behind the breastwork and made ready to hold it to the last possible minute.
In that last minute assistance arrived—and arrived clearly only just in time. Headed by an officer, a strong detachment of the Stonewalls, hurrying along the trench, found Larry standing waist-high above the barricade jerking the detonating-strings and hurling the last of his grenades as fast as he could throw them into the pit, from which arose a pandemonium of crashing explosions, yells and shrieks, guttural curses and the banging reports of rifles.
The Stonewalls swarmed, cheering, over the barricade and down into the hole beyond like terriers into a rat-pit. Most of the Germans there threw down their rifles and threw up their hands. The rest were killed swiftly, and the Stonewalls, with hardly a check, charged across the pit into the trench beyond, swept it clear of the enemy for a full two hundred yards, and then firmly established themselves in and across it with swiftly-built barricades and plentiful stores of bombs. Larry’s share ended there, and Larry himself exited from the scene of his first command quite inconspicuously on a stretcher.