The fighting fell to a new phase--the work of the short-arm bayonet thrust and the bomb-throwers. In the gaps between the points where the trench was taken the enemy fought with the desperation of trapped rats. The trench had to be taken traverse by traverse. The bombers lobbed their missiles over into the traverse ahead of them in showers, and immediately the explosions crashed out, swung round the corner with a rush to be met in turn with bullets or bursting bombs. Sometimes a space of two or three traverses was blasted bare of life and rendered untenable for long minutes on end by a constant succession of grenades and bombs. In places, the men of one side or the other leaped up out of the trench, risking the bullets that sleeted across the level ground, and emptied a clip of cartridges or hurled half a dozen grenades down into the trench further along. But for the most part the fight raged below ground-level, at times even below the level of the trench floor, where a handful of men held out in a deep dug-out. If the entrance could be reached, a few bombs speedily settled the affair; but where the defenders had hastily blocked themselves in with a barricade of sandbags or planks, so that grenades could not be pitched in, there was nothing left to do but crowd in against the rifle muzzles that poked out and spurted bullets from the openings, tear down the defences, and so come at the defenders. And all the time the captured trench was pelted by shells--high-explosive and shrapnel. At the entrances of the communication trenches that led back to the support trenches the fiercest fighting raged continually, with men struggling to block the path with sandbags and others striving to tear them down, while on both sides their fellows fought over them with bayonet and butt. In more than one such place the barricade was at last built by the heap of the dead who had fought for possession; in others, crude barriers of earth and sandbags were piled up and fought across and pulled down and built up again a dozen times.