exactly whenever we please.

Just then a dark figure crept round the traverse of the buttress of the
trench. "Room in here?" he asked.

Two others came after him, bending, and then a fourth. We squeezed along
to make room.

"Was you hit?" asked the second man of the first.

"Only a bang on the scalp, and I wouldn't have got that if it hadn't
been for the prisoner--waiting to get him over."

"Keep your head down, Mac, you'll only get hit," said a third. "Where's
Mr. Franks--you all right, sir?--Mr. Little was hit, wasn't he?"

So these were the raiders, and they had come through it after all. They
were rather distracted. The man next me wiped his forehead, and took a
cigarette. He looked disinterestedly up at the shell-bursts, but he
talked very little. He looked on the raid as a bit of a failure,
clearly.

An hour later we heard all about it. The racket had quietened down. The
enemy was contenting himself with throwing a few shrapnel shells far
back over communication trenches. We were in a room lighted with
candles. In the midst of an interested crowd of half a dozen young
officers was a youngster in grey cloth, with a mud be-spattered coat, a
swollen face, and two bandaged hands. On the table were a coffee-pot,
some cups, and biscuits, and a small heap of loot--gas masks and
bayonets, and such stuff from German dug-outs. Most of the crowd was