“Glory be!” said Rifleman McRory, flattening himself to the ground.  “It’s a good foot and a half I have of head-cover, and I’m thinking it’s soon we will be needing it, and all the rest we can get.”

The flaring lights ceased again for a moment, and the men plied their tools in feverish haste to strengthen their scanty shelter against the storm they knew must soon fall upon them.

It came within a couple of minutes; again the lights streamed upward, and flares burst and floated down in dazzling balls of fierce white light, while the rifle-fire from the German parapet grew heavier and heavier.  Concealment was no longer possible, and the word was passed to get along with the work in light or dark; and so, still lying flat upon their faces, and with the bullets hissing and whistling above them, slapping into the low parapet and into the bare ground beside them, the working party scooped and buried and scraped, knowing that every inch they could sink themselves or heighten their parapet added to their chance of life.

The work they had done gave them a certain amount of cover, at least for the vital parts of head and shoulders, but in the next half-hour there were many casualties, and man after man worked on with blood oozing through the hastily-applied bandage of a first field-dressing or crawled in under 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.