"But," said Larry, diving for his morsel of cigar, "you don't mean——?"
"I mean," said Bill, "that the Germans are all round us, that we chaps down here are probably cut off, and that we're in a tight fix. Where's yer rifles? Where's yer bombs? Some of you men have got a store of bombs down here that you were to carry up to the front line, and what about ammunition stocks? This is a business! Look here, boys, make ready whilst I go up and have another look round. The thing to do would be to decide which way to go, how to act if we are surrounded. We shall be made prisoners the moment we turn out, or get shot down. I'm not asking to be made a prisoner—not me!"
"Nor me neither," came from the burly individual who had borne the steaming dixie into the dug-out, "nor me neither, Bill. I had some!" he added, and he actually grinned in spite of the precariousness of their situation. "Don't yer forgit, young feller, that in 1915 I was took at Hulloch, opposite Loos, you know—no yer don't, 'cos you was in America; but Hulloch's just where we gave the Hun proper stuff somewhere about September, 1915. Well, I got pinched, and for about a week I was a guest of the Kaiser's. Oh, no thanks! No more being a guest of the Kaiser nor of any other Hun, I thank you. Skilly ain't in it—I give yer my word, I was worn wellnigh to a shadow—I——"
The incorrigible, loquacious fellow would have gone on discussing the event for half an hour had not Bill abruptly interrupted him, while another of the men brusquely ended his conversation.
"Stow it, Nobby! You as thin as a rake, eh? You'll be thin soon if you don't hold yer wind and help us to get out of what looks like a nasty business. Yes, young Bill, you nip up, me and the other boys'll make ready."
"And I'll go along with him," said Jim, making towards the stairway.
They clambered up rapidly, Jim adjusting his gas respirator. Then, arrived at the gas curtain, they pulled it slowly aside and peered out. It was lighter still, for every minute now made a difference. Mounting higher overhead was the spring sun, though still invisible, yet sucking continuously at the moisture, driving deep lanes through it, trying all the while to send its rays to the soaked earth underneath. There were figures moving about, a batch of men disarmed and dressed in khaki were being marched across the narrow foreground; officers dressed in field grey—the German uniform—were galloping to and fro, and a host of men were staggering past bearing machine-guns and trench mortars. It was a German invasion in fact. For the German hosts, seizing the opportunity provided by mist, had taken the British Fifth Army at a disadvantage, and, coming on by the thousand, had swept through their front line and were already hotly engaged with other troops farther to the rear. In that sudden, successful advance they had overwhelmed small parties of the British, they had run over trenches and advanced posts and dug-outs, and, in fact, they had erected a curtain between those men in the front line who had been unable to fall back, and their comrades now resisting the enemy advance.
In that area which they had so suddenly captured lay the dug-out in which Bill and his friends were quartered, and they too, like many another party, were derelict, surrounded, encompassed by enemies, with no way out, though as yet they were not actually prisoners.
"Huh!" grunted Bill, peering from beneath the flap of the blanket, "it don't look healthy—do it? A fellow don't know which way to turn nor what to do. If we wait, we are taken. There'll be a party of Germans come along and summon us to surrender. Then it would be a case of 'hands up' and 'come out'—or——"