Then they lifted up their voices in a great shout of "Hold on, sir!" And Dennis yelled: "Bob, you juggins, do you want to do the lot of us in?"
"Oh, it's you, is it?" cried his brother, sliding through the opening with a sergeant and a couple of bombers. "I might have known you'd be mixed up in it somehow. We heard some German jabbering and chanced our arm."
"And a lucky thing for us you did," said Dennis, pointing to the hideously bespattered grey-green uniforms that littered the earth heap. Only one of the nine men was moving, and after a convulsive opening and shutting of his hands the movement ceased altogether. "How is it going up above?"
"Top-hole, so far," said the Captain. "At least, as far as our battalion is concerned, though there seems to be a bit of a check among those chaps on our left. Nobody else down here? Very well; this is the quickest way out, and every minute is an hour. We've got their first-line trench, or all that was left of it." And they scrambled once more up the land slide into the open-air.
CHAPTER XVI
The Silencing of the Guns
The German guns were flinging a terrific barrage fire behind us in a vain attempt to prevent our reserves coming up, and Dennis found that the spot at which they had emerged was close to the entrance of the village, if one could dignify those shapeless heaps of brick and mortar by such a name.