eeping
shrapnel, streamed through with men still falling at every step,
reached the parapet and leaped over and down. The guns had held their
fire on the trench till the last possible moment, and now they lifted
again and sought to drop across the further lines and the communication
trenches a shrapnel 'curtain' through which no reinforcements could
pass and live. The following battalion came surging across, losing
heavily, but still bearing weight enough to tell when at last they
poured in over the parapet.

The neutral ground, the deadly open and exposed space, was won. It had
been crossed at other points, and now it only remained to see if the
hold could be maintained and strengthened and extended.

The fighting fell to a new phase--the work of the short-arm bayonet
thrust and the bomb-throwers. In the gaps between the points where the
trench was taken the enemy fought with the desperation of trapped rats.
The trench had to be taken traverse by traverse. The bombers lobbed
their missiles over into the traverse ahead of them in showers, and
immediately the explosions crashed out, swung round the corner with a
rush to be met in turn with bullets or bursting bombs. Sometimes a
space of two or three traverses was blasted bare of life and rendered
untenable for long minutes on end by a constant succession of grenades
and bombs. In places, the men of one side or the other leaped up out
of the trench, risking the bullets that sleeted across the level
ground, and emptied a clip of cartridges or hurled half a dozen
grenades down into the trench further along. But for the most part the
fight raged below ground-level, at times even below the level of the
trench floor, where a handful of men held out in a deep dug-out. If
the entrance could be reached, a few bombs speedily settled the affair;
but where the defenders had hastily blocked themselves in with a
barricade of sandbags or planks, so that grenades could not be pitched
in, there was nothing left to do but crowd in against the rifle muzzles
that poked out and spurted bullets from the openings, tear down the
defences, and so come at the defenders. And all the time the captured
trench was pelted by shells--high-explosive and shrapnel. At the
entrances of the communication trenches that led back to the support
trenches the fiercest fighting raged continually, with men struggling
to block the path with sandbags and others striving to tear them down,
while on both