Right in the midst of all this uproar we heard one of his machine-guns cracking overhead.  Then another joined in—­we could hear them traversing from flank to front and round to flank again.  “Of course, the raiders cannot have got in,” one thought.  “Perhaps he has seen them crossing No Man’s Land, and those machine-guns are on to them in the open.  Poor beggars!  Not much chance for them now”—­and one shivered at the thought of them out there, open and defenceless to that hail.  As the minutes slipped on towards the hour, and our bombardment slackened, but the enemy’s did not, and no one stirred at all in the trenches, one felt quite sure of it—­of course, we had failed this time—­well, we ought to expect such failures; we cannot always hope to jump into German trenches 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 interestedly fingering a grey steel helmet with a heavy steel shield or visor in front of the forehead, evidently meant to be bullet-proof when the wearer looked over the parapet.  The prisoner was murmuring something like “Durchgeschossen,” “Durchgeschossen.”

“He says he’s shot through,” said someone, who understood a little German.

“Oh, nonsense,” broke in a youth; “you were shot through the hand, old man, but you were not shot there.”  The prisoner was pointing to his ribs.

“Oh, you’ve got a rat,” said the youngster, as the man went on pointing to the same place.  But he tore the man’s shirt open quickly.  “Yes, you have, sure enough,” he exclaimed, showing the small, neat entry hole of a bullet in the side.  “Here, sit down, old man, and take this,” he added tenderly, giving the man a cup of warm coffee, and pressing him to a chair.  The whole attitude had changed to one of solicitude.