Three minutes later the party dropped into a deserted bit of
trench and the fun commenced. . . .

Samuel was a bomber, and he carried twenty of these pleasant little
instruments as his stock in trade. With every nerve tingling with
excitement he followed the officer in front of him, who with a couple
of bayonet men headed the party. The first man they met was the
sentry, who was crouching on the fire-step to avoid the shelling, and
from that moment on--well, things hummed.

The subaltern--an excitable youth--smiled genially at the dazed
Bavarian, who was regarding the sudden invasion of his privacy as if it
was a bad dream; and having shot him in the stomach, passed breezily on
round the traverse, followed by his surging mob.

"Picket the other entrance," he roared to those behind, as he stepped
by the first shaft of a dug out, up which a man was rushing. "Come on,
my pet, come on--roll, bowl, or pitch, it's a cocoa-nut to a berlud
orange. . . ." The man fell back with a bullet through his brain, and
slid head down to the bottom of the shaft. "Bomb 'em, boys; bomb 'em."

With a roar the bombs went off in the confined space below the ground;
the lights went out, and a confused medley of shouts and groans
followed them up the trench as they sought pastures new. Control was
impossible: it was every man for himself, and to hell with everything
he could see. Each man fought his own little battle, in his own little
way, against one or two or three of the bewildered men who appeared
suddenly from odd places. And though they were bewildered, they
fought--those Huns: fought like good 'uns. In one corner a great burly
miner grappled with a Bavarian N.C.O. who had suddenly dropped over the
back of the trench armed only with a pick--straight from a working
party. Farther on, the subaltern and a bayonet man carried on the good
work with howls of joy, while a small party of bombers, having found a
large sump pit covered by boards in a communication trench, removed the
boards just in time to catch a relief party of six who came rushing up
the trench. With a resounding splash they went through the ice several
feet below the top of the hole, and were immediately joined by two
bombs.

As the corporal in charge of that party put it afterwards: "It was a
good idea that sump 'ole; because them that wern't killed by the bombs
was drowned, and the only one wot was neither, I 'it over the 'ead with
me gun; and 'ere he is. Ain