By and by Slade gave a little tug at my jerkin. I listened hard, and just made out footsteps, probably in the Boche fire trench itself, near the entrance to their new sap. Two or three minutes later we began really to enjoy ourselves. As far as we could make out Fritz hadn't a notion that we were on to his game. Six or eight of 'em came shuffling along the sap, carrying picks and shovels, and jabbering and growling away nineteen to the dozen. We could hear every sound. One fellow, anyhow, was smoking. We got the whiff of that. We could hear 'em spit, and, very nearly, we could hear them breathe. I did wish I knew a little more German than "Donnerwetter" and "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" I could feel the man on my left (the draper from No. 3) quivering like a coursing greyhound in a leash, and had to whisper to him to wait for the word. But Corporal Slade on my right might have been on the barrack square. I saw him use a match to pick his teeth while he listened. I'd rehearsed my fellows letter perfect in our own trench before we started, and when the Boches were fairly under way digging, I gave the signal with my left hand. There was a bomb in my right. Waiting for it as I was, I could distinctly hear the safety-pins come out of our six bombs, and could even hear the breathed murmur of the pugnacious draper at my shoulder: "A hundred an' one, a hundred an' two, a hundred an' three!" (He was timing the fuse of his bomb, exactly as I'd told 'em.) And then we tore a big hole in the night. Our six bombs landed, one on the edge and the other five plumb in the sap-head before us, right in the middle of the six or eight Boches digging there. Two seconds after they left our hands they did their job. It was less than two seconds really. And when the rending row was done we heard only one Boche moaning, so I knew that at least six or seven were "gone West" for keeps, and would strafe no more Englishmen. Now the idea had been that directly our job was done we should bolt for the head of Stinking Sap. But, while we'd been lying there, it had occurred to me that the Boches, knowing all about what distance bombs could be thrown, and that we must be lying in the open near their sap-head, ought to be able to sweep that ground with machine-gun fire before we could get to Stinking Sap, and that, having done that, they would surely send a whole lot more men down their new sap, to tackle what was left of us that way. Therefore I'd made each of my fellows carry four bombs in his pockets: twenty-four among the lot of us. And we'd only used six. Quite enough, too, for the Boches in that sap. Therefore, again, we now lay absolutely still, and just as close as wax, while Fritz rained parachute lights, stars, flares, and every kind of firework in the sky, and, just as I had fancied, swept his sap-head with at least a thousand rounds of machine-gun bullets, not one of which so much as grazed us, where we lay spread-eagled in the mud of that shell-hole.