the scanty parapet and crouched there helplessly.

It was little use at that stage trying to bring in the wounded. To do
so only meant exposing them to almost a certainty of another wound and
of further casualties amongst the stretcher-bearers. One or two men
were killed.

Lieutenant Riley, dragging himself along the line, found Rifleman
McRory hard at work behind the shelter of a body rolled up on top of
his parapet.

"It's killed he is," said McRory in answer to a question--"killed to
the bone. He won't be feeling any more bullets that hit him, and it's
himself would be the one to have said to use him this way."

Riley admitted the force of the argument and crept on. Work moved
faster now that there was no need to wait for the periods between the
lights; but the German fire also grew faster, and a machine gun began
to pelt its bullets up and down the length of the growing parapet.

By now, fortunately, the separate chain of pits dug by each man were
practically all connected up into a long, twisting, shallow trench.
Down this trench the wounded were passed, and a fresh working party
relieved the cramped and tired batch who had commenced the work.

In the main trench men had been hard at work filling sand-bags, and now
these were passed out, dragged along from man to man, and piled up on
the parapet, doubling the security of the workers and allowing them the
greater freedom of rising to their knees to dig.

The rifles and maxims of the Tearaways had from the main trench kept up
a steady volume of fire on the German parapet, in an endeavor to keep
down its fire. They shot from the main trench in comparative safety,
because the German fire was directed almost exclusively on the new
trench.

Now that the new parapet had been heightened and strengthened, the
casualties behind it had almost ceased, and the Tearaways were quite
reasonably flattering themselves on the worst of the work being done
and the worst of the dangers over. It appeared to them that the trench
now provided quite sufficient shelter to fulfill both its ostensible
object of allowing relief parties to move to and from the
listening-post, and also their own private undertaking of attaining the
dead General; but the O.C. and company commanders did not look on it in
that light.

The order was to construct a firing trench, and that meant a good deal
more work than had been done, so reliefs were kept going and the work
progressed steadily all night, a