The nearest German trench caught the clank-clink, and by a simple process of deduction and elimination arrived at its meaning and its location. The pump and the pumpers led a troubled life after that. Snipers kept an unsteady but never silent series of bullets smacking into the stones of the ruin, whistling over the communication trench, and 'whupp'-ing into the mud around both. A light gun took a hand and plumped a number of rounds each day into the crumbling walls and rubbish-heaps of stone and brick, and burst shrapnel all over the lot. The Sappers dodged the snipers by keeping tight and close to cover; they frustrated the direct-hitting 'Fizz-Bang' shells by a stout barricade of many thicknesses of sandbags bolstering up the fragment of wall that hid their shaft and pump, and finally they erected a low roof over the works and sandbagged that secure against the shrapnel. There were casualties of course, but these are always in the way of business with the Sappers and came as a matter of course. The Germans brought up a trench-mortar next and flung noisy and nerve-wrecking high-explosive bombs into and all round the ruin, bursting down all the remaining walls except the sandbagged one and scoring a few more casualties until the forward trench installed a trench-mortar of their own, and by a generous return of two bombs to the enemy's one put the German out of action. A big _minnenwerfer_ came into play next, and because it could throw a murderous-sized bomb from far behind the German trench it was too much for the British trench-mortar to tackle. This brought the gunners into the game, and the harassed infantry (who were coming to look on the Sapper Subaltern and his works as an unmitigated nuisance and a most undesirable acquaintance who drew more than a fair share of enemy fire on them) appealed to the guns to rid them of their latest tormentor. An Artillery Observing Officer spent a perilous hour or two amongst the shrapnel and snipers' bullets on top of the sandbagged wall, until he had located the _minnenwerfer_. Then about two minutes' telephoned talk to the Battery and ten minutes of spouting lyddite volcanoes finished the _minnenwerfer_ trouble. But all this above-ground work was by way of an aside to the Sapper Subaltern. He was far too busy with his mine gallery to worry about the doings of gunners and bomb-throwers and infantry and such-like fellows. When these people interfered with his work they were a nuisance of course, but he always managed to find a working party for the sandbagging protective work without stopping the job underground.