Again the attack was made all along the line, and again, under the ferocious fire of the reinforced line, it was beaten back. The line had at the last minute been hinged outward behind the Sergeant, and so joined up with him that it formed a sharpish angle, with the Sergeant’s crater at its point. The enfilade fire of this forward-swung portion and the two machine-guns in the crater did a good deal to help cut down the main attack. When it was well over, and the attack had melted away, the Captain of the Sergeant’s Company pushed up into the crater. “Who’s in charge here?” he asked. “You, Sergeant? Your note came back, and we sent you help; but you were taking a long risk out here. Didn’t you know you had pushed out beyond your proper point? And why didn’t you retire when you found yourself in the air?” The Sergeant turned and pointed out where the thinning smoke gave a view of the wide open flats of the plain beyond the ridge. “I got a look o’ that, sir,” he said, “and I just thought a commanding position like this was worth sticking a lot to hang to.” “Jove! and you were right,” said the Captain, looking gloatingly on the flats, and went on to add other and warmer words of praise. But it was to his corporal, a little later, that the Sergeant really explained his hanging on to the point. “Look at it!” he said enthusiastically; “look at the view you get!” The Corporal viewed dispassionately for a moment the dreary expanse below, the shell-churned morass and mud, wandering rivulets and ditches, shell-wrecked fragments of farms and buildings, the broken, bare-stripped poles of trees. “Bloomin’ great, ain’t it?” he mumbled disgustedly, through his bandaged jaws. “Fair beautiful. Makes you think you’d like to come ’ere after the war an’ build a ’ouse, an’ sit lookin’ out on it always—I _don’t_ think.” “Exactly what I said the second I saw it,” said the Sergeant, and chuckled happily. “Only my house’d be a nice little trench an’ a neat little dug-out, an’ be for duration o’ war. Think o’ it, man—just think o’ this winter, with us up here along the ridge, an’ Fritz down in his trenches below there, up to the middle in mud. Him cursin’ Creation, and strugglin’ to pump his trenches out; and us sitting nicely up here in the dry, snipin’ down in enfilade along his trench, and pumpin’ the water out of our trenches down on to the flat to drown him out.”