The signaler made no answer.  He was quite busy at the moment rearranging his disturbed papers and blowing the dust and grit off them.

A telephonist at another table commenced to take and write down a message.  It came from the forward trench on the left, and merely said briefly that the attack on the center was spreading to them and that they were holding it with some difficulty.  The message was sent up to the O.C.  “Whoever the O.C. may be,” as the sergeant said softly.  “If the Colonel was upstairs when that shell hit, there’s another O.C. now, most like.”  But the Colonel had escaped that shell and sent a message back to the left trench to hang on, and that he had asked for reenforcements.

“He did ask,” said the sergeant grimly, “but when he’s going to get ’em is a different pair o’ shoes.  It’ll take those messengers most of an hour to get there, even if they dodge all the lead on the way.”

As the minutes passed, it became more and more plain that the need for reenforcements was growing more and more urgent.  The sergeant was standing now at the open door of the cellar, and the noise of the conflict swept down and clamored and beat about them.

“Think I’ll just slip up and have a look round,” said the sergeant.  “I shan’t be long.”

When he had gone, the signaler rose and closed the door; it was cold enough, as he very sensibly argued, and his being able to hear the fighting better would do nothing to affect its issue.  Just after came another call on his instrument, and the repair party told him they had crossed the neutral ground, had one man wounded in the arm, that he was going on with them, and they were still following up the wire.  The message ceased, and the telephonist, leaning his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands, was almost asleep before he realized it.  He wakened with a jerk, lit another cigarette, and stamped up and down the room trying to warm his numbed feet.

First one orderly and then another brought in messages to be sent to the other trenches, and the signaler held them a minute and gathered some more particulars as to how the fight was progressing up there.  The particulars were not encouraging.  We must have lost a lot of men, since the whole place was clotted up with casualties that kept coming in quicker than the stretcher-bearers could move them.  The rifle-fire was hot, the bombing was still hotter, and the shelling was perhaps the hottest and most horrible of all.  Of the last the signaler hardly required an account; the growling thumps of heavy shells exploding, kept sending little shivers down the cellar walls, the shiver being, oddly enough, more emphatic when the wail of the falling shell ended in a muffled thump that proclaimed the missile “blind” or “a dud.”  Another hurried messenger plunged down the steps with a note written by the adjutant to say the colonel was severely wounded and had sent for the second in command to take over.  Ten more dragging minutes passed, and now the separate little shivers and thrills that shook the cellar walls had merged and run together.  The rolling crash of the falling shells and the bursting of bombs came close and fast one upon another, and at intervals the terrific detonation of an aerial torpedo dwarfed for the moment all the other sounds.