That was the moment which was chosen by one of the party to go along and see that the men were all right. There was a sentry in the next bay of the trench. All by himself, but "right as rain," as he puts it. Shrapnel was breaking in showers on the parapet, swishing overhead like driven hail. While the enemy is bursting shell on your parapet he cannot come there himself. Provided that your sentry's nerves are all right, and that a "crump" does not drop right into his little section of trench, there is not much that can go wrong. And there is nothing much wanting in the nerves of this infantry. However, something had clearly gone wrong with this attack. It was quite obvious that the enemy somehow or another knew that it was coming off, and where; for he had begun to shoot back within a very few minutes of our opening shot, and he was shooting very hard. Clearly he had noticed some point in our preparations, and he too had prepared. "I will teach these people a lesson this time," he thought, as he laid his guns on the likely section. 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.