A General Action

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The British gunners had been warned not to open fire unless called upon, because a working party was in the open; but now the batteries were telephoned to with a request for shrapnel on the German parapets to keep down some of the heavy rifle fire.

Since the gunners had already registered the target of the German trench, their fire was just as accurate by night as it would be by day, and shell after shell burst over the German parapet, sweeping their trench with showers of shrapnel.

While all this was going on the men at the listening-post had tackled the job of driving their sap out to the German General. This work was done in a different fashion from the digging of the new trench.

The listening-post was merely a pit in the ground, originally a large shell crater, and deepened and widened until it was sufficiently large to hold half-a-dozen men. At one side of the pit the men commenced with pick and spade to hack out an opening like a very narrow doorway.

As the earth was broken down and shoveled back, the doorway gradually grew to be a passage. In this two men at a time worked in turn, the one on the right-hand side making a narrow cut that barely gave him shoulder-play, the second man on the left working a few paces in the rear and widening the passage.

Necessarily it was slow work, because only these two men could reach the face of the cut, and because it had to be of sufficient depth to allow a man to work upright without his head showing above the ground. But because they worked in short reliefs and put every ounce of energy into their task, they made surprising and unusual progress.

Lieutenant Riley, who was in command of the listening-post for that night, left the workers to themselves, both because it was necessary for him to keep a sharp look-out in order to give warning of any attempt to rush the working party, and because officially he was not supposed to know anything of any sap to an officially unrecognized dead German General.

When he was relieved after daybreak, Riley told the joke and explained the position to the subaltern who took over from him, and that subaltern in turn looked with a merely unofficial eye on the work of the sapping party. As the day and the work went on, it was quite obvious that a good many more men were working on the new trench than had been told off to it.

In the sap several fresh men were constantly awaiting their turn at the face with pick and shovel. The diggers did no more than five minutes' work, hacking and spading at top speed, yielding their tools to the next comer and retiring, panting and blowing and mopping their streaming brows.