"Keep it up, Bowdy!" cried Snogger. "Are they near?"
"They're not far away," said Bowdy without looking round. "Devil blow me blind, they'll be here in a second if you don't come up and give me a hand.... Ha! They've stopped now, a shell has caught a couple."
"All right, Bowdy, we're here," the sergeant shouted reaching the summit.
The main body of Germans, advancing in open order, was still some fifty yards away. As far as could be ascertained at the moment, the delay (they should have been across the open three minutes ago) was due to a heavy curtain fire which had greeted them just as they came out of their trenches. The fire caught them at the barbed wire entanglements, concussion shells tore up the wires and swept them around the bodies of the attackers, and the impartial shrapnel rained viciously down on the huddled heaps of wounded.
The quick were advancing, a dispirited party of men, in open order, glad to get away from their own trenches, which were suffering cruel chastisement. Some were willing to fight even yet; five or six had flung themselves down on the ground and trained their rifles on the British positions, opening a wild erratic fire of slight intensity. Cold hands never hold a rifle steady on a Christmas morning.
The men in the crater lay down behind the parapet which the exploding mine had formed and opened fire with deadly effect.
"That'll knock the blurry stuffin' out o' them," Spudhole remarked. "There they come now, their 'ands up in the air." It was even as he remarked. The advanced line of Germans put their timorous hands over their heads and stepped diffidently towards the mine. "Kamerad! Kamerad!" they whined, their arms shaking as if stricken with palsy. The snipers threw their rifles away and joined in with their mates. All were sick of the job.
"Take them prisoners," said Sergeant Snogger. "There's nothing else to be done."
An hour later when the wounded had been carried back to the trench and the prisoners were marched off to the village at the rear, the victors were left to themselves, in undisputed possession of their hard-won crater.
The Christmas morning scene was one never to be forgotten: the rain-swept crater, the crumbling clay, the fumes of gunpowder, the dead bodies, the monotonous hum of ragtime choruses, the shells bursting across the top, the dirty rifles and the dirtier men who endeavoured to clean them. Bowdy Benners was there with a full pack and a bulging haversack. Fitzgerald and Spudhole were deep in a discussion on some nonsensical subject; but the discussion served its object, it brought the men's minds away from the stark reality of their surroundings. Snogger sitting on his haunches, was giving details of the fight to his platoon commander, Captain Thorley.