Page:Lieutenant and Others (1915) by Sapper.djvu/54

 Bavarian officer’s revolver found a home in the earth, and the Bavarian himself fell with a crash to the bottom of the trench.

But it could not go on. In places they were breaking; in places they were broken; but, unfortunately, in one place they had got through. At the extreme left of Gerald’s trench, which he had been unable to reach during the day owing to a huge hole blown out of the parapet, the Germans had scrambled in. Elsewhere they had fallen back to their own lines, pursued the whole way by men stabbing and hacking at them, their eyes red with the lust of killing, getting a bit of their own back after the unspeakable hell of the morning. And what but a quarter of an hour previously had been bare, open ground was now covered with motionless bodies, from which, later, a few wounded would drag themselves back to their own people.

It was when comparative quiet again reigned that one of his sergeants came to Gerald and reported the uninvited appearance of the Germans away down on the left. Now the presence of the enemy in your own trench in small parties is, I understand, a