In front of the position lay between forty and fifty dead or wounded Highlanders—reserves, who, caught in the open while advancing in support of an Irish battalion, had been surprised and mown down by machine-gun fire. The wily Prussians had lain low when the first wave of British had swept over their trenches, and by one of those inexplicable omissions a detachment had not been left to consolidate and clear up the captured ground.
Several of the wounded Jocks frantically cheered the oncoming Tank, at the same time shouting warnings that there was a pitfall in front. Some of them actually staggered to their feet, and grasping their rifles followed the ponderous landship as it approached the ridge held by the men of the Prussian Guard.
Almost at the brink of the exposed trap Setley brought his command to a halt. While the quickfirers and machine-guns replied most effectually to the Boches' fire the subaltern examined from the interior of the Tank the nature and extent of the barrier that lay betwixt him and the enemy.
The pit measured roughly fifty feet by thirty. A little less than half of the covering still remained—fir planks covered with a few inches of clay that harmonized with the surrounding ground. Unless the Huns had constructed another pitfall alongside this one, it would be practicable to pass it by keeping a few yards to the left.
The roof of the trapped Tank was plainly visible, but there were no signs of any of her crew. In their unenviable position they could do nothing in self-defence. The edge of the pit intervened between the muzzles of the Tank's guns and the hostile trench, but this did not prevent the Huns hurling their bombs over the parapet into the pit.
There was no chance of extricating the snared mastodon. Unlike the one that was towed out of action when Setley, then a mere private, played such a daring part, the Tank was penned in by the four vertical sides of the deep cavity—climbing a vertical wall of stiff clay is one of the accomplishments that a Tank cannot do. Later on, when the foe were cleared away, gangs of men would be set to work to dig an inclined plane, up which the ponderous machine would be able to climb to the open ground.
Heaving a sigh of relief as his command safely negotiated the passage past the hidden end of the obstruction, Ralph steered straight for the strongly held earthwork. The Huns, working fervently to get their diabolical fire-squirting apparatus in order, held their ground. Seeking cover behind sand-bags hastily thrown across the floor of the trench, and crouching in the concreted entrances to their dug-outs, they hailed bullets against the avenging Tank's blunt, armour-plated nose. Bombs, too, burst with an appalling clatter above and below the stupendous moving fortress.
The crew gave good measure in exchange. With their machine-guns spitting venomously and the quickfirers barking loudly the British accounted for numbers of their foes, while the Tank set to work systematically to level the barbed wire and flatten out the parapet of sand-bags.
In their puny rage several of the Huns closed round the Tank. Immune from the fire of her machine-guns they rained blows with axes at her tractor-bands, and even attempted to check the resistless, crushing motion by means of crossbars. All in vain: like a hippopotamus beset with a swarm of flies the Tank continued its dignified progress, levelling all that came in its way; until with the now monotonous cry of "Kamerad," the surviving Prussians surrendered.
"Let a couple of Jocks take 'em back, sir," suggested Sergeant Archer. "All the stuffing's knocked out of them, I guess."