"When the sergeant lifts his branch and holds it over his head, prepare to advance," he whispered. "Get your bombs ready to throw.... Pass it along to right and left."
Fascinated Reynolds watched the sergeant, saw him lie still as ever for a full minute, then he raised the branch and held it over his head for an instant, brought it down again and got to his feet. As one man the party rushed forward to the rim of the trench and began to fling their bombs in on the occupants. There was one explosion, then a second, a third and a fourth.... The Germans, taken unawares, raced from one bay to another, but the bombers waited for them at every turning. In their eyes the attack might have been delivered by an army corps. Death had crept up in the night out of the unknown. Men fell, yelled in agony, and became silent, their white faces showing ghastly on the floor of the trench when the smoke of the explosions died away.
"Damned good work! Keep at it, boys!" yelled the sergeant, standing on the parapet and drawing a pin from the shoulders of a bomb. "They're damned unlucky this 'ere time."
He threw his missile at a German who was trying to enter the door of a dug-out, and stepped back to avoid the explosion.
"Blimey, it's a barney!" said Bubb, looking down in the trench. He had come to his last bomb, and wanting to "make it tell," he threw it into a dug-out door which showed in the wall of the parados. Followed an explosion accompanied by agonised yelling....
Twenty yards away Reynolds stood on a sandbag, a bomb in his hand, his eyes fixed upon a boy about his own age who, crouching against the wall of the trench, was looking up at him. Reynolds, full of military ardour, had rushed up to the attack when the order was given, and was on the point of flinging the bomb into the trench when he noticed the young German standing motionless, paralysed with fear. Reynolds raised the bomb with the intention of throwing it, then brought it down again. The terrified foe frightened him. In the heat of passion, Reynolds would have killed him, but to take away the life of that shivering, terrified creature was not a job for the youngish newly-out. He gazed at the German, the German returned the gaze, perplexity looked at dread and became horrified. Killing was not an easy matter.
Reynolds drew back a pace, his eyes still fixed on the foe. The battle raged around him; the flash of the bursting bombs almost blinded him, the explosions shook the ground ... the flying splinters sang through the air.
Suddenly the order to retire came down the line; a brown figure rushed up to Reynolds shouting something about "getting out o't," seized the bomb which the youngster held and flung it into the trench on the youthful German.
The party retired hurriedly; their work was completed. "The sooner back the safer," the sergeant yelled. "They'll open up a machine gun now and we'll be damned unlucky if we don't grease back."
Already the enemy's rifles were speaking and bullets swept by with a vicious hiss. The men stumbled through the opening in the barbed wires and rushed into the levels. Benners and Reynolds ran out together chuckling, pleased, no doubt, at the success of their enterprise. Bubb and Flanagan followed; the latter had lost his rifle and vowed that he was always unlucky.