The promised attack, however, did not develop for the next forty-eight hours, and during the whole of that time the battalion had to lie still and suffer such an inferno of bombardment, such a purgatory of bitter cold and driving rain, such a misery of knee-deep mud and crouching in painfully cramped positions, that at the end of the time they were openly praying for an attack, British or German, they did not care which, so long as it ended or even relieved the intolerable waiting. ‘I made up my mind a month ago that I was bound to be killed,’ said Sergeant Billy Ruff of ‘C’ Company disgustedly. ‘I’d sorter reconciled myself to bein’ blotted out by a bullet, or blasted off the earth by a Black Maria, or skewered on a bayonet; but blow me if I ever counted on bein’ drownded in a two-foot mud puddle as I looks like bein’ now.’ ‘Why don’t the _soors_[1] come on an’ fight it out,’ said Corporal Smedley. ‘They _bukked_[2] enough about wot they was goin’ to do. Why don’t they _hitherao_[3] an’ do it. I’m about sick o’ this shellin’ game.’ ‘The shellin’ is bad enough,’ agreed Sergeant Ruff, ‘but I’m sicker o’ this swimmin’ gymkhana. They ought to serve us out a cork jacket an’ a swimmin’ suit an’ a harpoon a-piece instead o’ a rifle, to play this game proper.’ He was certainly fairly entitled to call the shelling ‘bad enough.’ It was the worst they had known yet, and that, for men who had been in it from the first days of Mons, was saying a good deal. The Germans appeared to have selected their portion of the front for the heaviest concentration of their artillery, and a rain of shells fell without ceasing night or day on the battered trenches. The men kept what cover they could, but that was little use against monster shells which blew to fragments them and their cover together. The British artillery was completely overwhelmed, and although it had struggled gallantly to maintain the unequal contest, was unable to afford the slightest relief to the suffering infantry. The casualties in the battalion mounted steadily, and apparently it was merely a matter of time until it should be utterly destroyed; but the men, although they grumbled deep and loud about the weather and the wet and the mud, the slowness of the Germans to attack, the bully beef and the biscuits and the missing of a rum ration, uttered no single grumble about the fate that kept them there or the wounds and death that carried them off singly and in groups.