"No!" Bill told him abruptly. "Hun or no Hun, we'd play the game and take 'em prisoners; but there's too many of 'em."
"And a jolly good job too," Nobby growled. "If it's to be a case of taking prisoners and playing the game, or a case of fightin', let's fight. There's not one of us as ain't ready for it."
"Not one." A glance round at the assembled men showed them all eager, some gripping their rifles with bayonets fixed, others already opening pouches which carried their bombs, while Larry had produced from amongst the ruins an iron bar some two feet in length, which he proposed to use as a club. Bill smiled upon them.
"Good boys!" he said. "One of you chaps pitch a bomb over, just to let 'em know that they ain't welcome; then the fight'll start fair. Now, all the rest get down under cover."
It was Nobby who stepped into the centre of the ruin so as to give his arm free play, and, pulling the safety-pin from his grenade, measured the distance with his eye and lobbed it over, all eyes following its path till presently it struck the ground perhaps twenty yards in front of the leading German. Then there was a violent explosion; the enemy advancing upon the ruin halted, looked at one another, discussed the situation, and even began to retreat. But, a minute later, one, who proved to be an officer, crawling right behind the others, came to the head of the column, and, realizing that none but an enemy could have tossed that bomb, and that here, quite by accident, he and his men had unearthed a party of the British, sent scouts out to surround the place, and presently, calling other men to his assistance, opened rifle-fire upon them. The action had begun. From the numbers engaged upon it on the enemy's side it looked as though Bill and his friends had little chance of pursuing their journey.
CHAPTER XV Attacked from All Sides
"It's going to be an attack from all sides," said Bill, as he crouched behind a mass of masonry which stood rather higher than the rest, and which, while giving a certain amount of shelter, also allowed him to look out over the wreckage of the factory, to peer into neighbouring shell-holes, past shattered and rent tree trunks towards the Albert-Bapaume road in one direction, to Courcellette in the other, and elsewhere across the desert of churned-up earth which represented the heart of this once beautiful Somme country. "And I can see heads bobbing up here and there and everywhere, and, yes, there go the bullets!"
One of them splashed debris and rotting mortar in his eyes as it struck the fractured masonry just above his head, while another thudded into a sand-bag not a yard from him—a sand-bag which had lain there rotting since 1916, and which now, receiving the sudden blow, burst asunder, the earth which it had contained spouting out in a cascade. It was answered almost instantly by a shot fired from a crevice somewhere down below him. He searched for the figure of the man who had discharged his weapon, and after a while distinguished the well-known form of Nobby, his broad shoulders squeezed in an angle of broken masonry, his head thrust forward, his tin hat covering him like a halo, legs bent beneath him, arms pressed to his sides, weapon at the ready. Glancing across the open space towards Courcellette, Bill saw one of those dodging German figures suddenly rear itself erect, bend forward as if about to fall, then with an effort straighten up, only of a sudden to give vent to a shrill shout—a shriek almost—and collapse into the shell-hole from which he had originally clambered.