Others besides himself had now reached the scene, among them a veteran lieutenant who ordered a pick and shovel detail to get busy at once.
"Back to dugouts!" was his sharp order to the Sammies who had run to the scene. "Don't expose yourselves unnecessarily."
Jimmy, however, was one of the digging detail. Seizing a shovel, he began to dig furiously into the soft earth. It yielded easily. Careful lest he strike the body of the buried soldier with the shovel, he soon had enough of the smothering mud cleared away to expose the man's head and shoulders.
First sight of the victim's head, and Jimmy shuddered. The face under the helmet was caved in, an unrecognizable, bloody pulp.
"Poor fellow," Jimmy muttered. "He got it pretty quick." He wondered who the man was. Not one of his men. They had all been in the dugout when the crash came.
While he continued at digging the dead man out of his prison, the rest of the detail were busy clearing the trench of the piled-up earth that formed a blockade.
"It was a 'Minnie,'" one of the veteran diggers informed Jimmy.
"Minnie" means a high-power trench mortar shell, of German invention. It is used particularly by the Germans to demolish the Allied trenches. Its real name is "Minnenwerfer." It is especially deadly, as it makes no noise coming through the air. The English soldier is responsible for giving it the name "Minnie."
"Funny they don't follow it up with some more," Jimmy observed to the man, as the latter stolidly wielded a pick.
Hardly had he spoken when a hail of bullets set in from an enemy machine gun. The Boches had begun to turn their energies to the caved-in parapet. Occasionally a single bullet sped past the diggers, but none of them were hit.