e trenches, one felt
quite sure of it--of course, we had failed this time--well, we ought to
expect such failures; we cannot always hope to jump into German trenches
exactly whenever we please.

Just then a dark figure crept round the traverse of the buttress of the
trench. "Room in here?" he asked.

Two others came after him, bending, and then a fourth. We squeezed along
to make room.

"Was you hit?" asked the second man of the first.

"Only a bang on the scalp, and I wouldn't have got that if it hadn't
been for the prisoner--waiting to get him over."

"Keep your head down, Mac, you'll only get hit," said a third. "Where's
Mr. Franks--you all right, sir?--Mr. Little was hit, wasn't he?"

So these were the raiders, and they had come through it after all. They
were rather distracted. The man next me wiped his forehead, and took a
cigarette. He looked disinterestedly up at the shell-bursts, but he
talked very little. He looked on the raid as a bit of a failure,
clearly.

An hour later we heard all about it. The racket had quietened down. The
enemy was contenting himself with throwing a few shrapnel shells far
back over communication trenches. We were in a room lighted with
candles. In the midst of an interested crowd of half a dozen young
officers was a youngster in grey cloth, with a mud be-spattered coat, a
swollen face, and two bandaged hands. On the table were a coffee-pot,
some cups, and biscuits, and a small heap of loot--gas masks and
bayonets, and such stuff from German dug-outs. Most of the crowd was
interestedly fingering a grey steel helmet with a heavy steel shield or
visor in front of the forehead, evidently meant to be bullet-proof when
the wearer looked over the parapet. The prisoner was murmuring something
like "Durchgeschossen," "Durchgeschossen."

"He says he's shot through," said someone, who understood a little
German.

"Oh, nonsense," broke in a youth; "you were shot through the hand, old
man, but you were not shot there." The prisoner was pointing to his
ribs.

"Oh, you've got a rat," said the youngster, as the man went on pointing
to the same place. But he tore the man's shirt open quickly. "Yes, you
have, sure enough," he exclaimed, showing the small, neat entry hole of
a bullet in the side. "Here, sit down, old man, and take this," he added
tenderly, giving the man a cup of warm coffee, and pressing him to a
chair. The whole attitude had changed to one of solicitude.

It was while t