iliar voice said, "Who in hell do you think it
is?" I said, "Nobby! is that you? What the mischief are you doing?"
He said, "I'm looking for what you never can find when you need it, a
d---- shovel." The lad was one of our tunnellers, and we were glad to
have his company and also his help in the "digging-out" process. Not
finding a shovel, we commenced work with our hands--after we had been
working for half an hour Nobby grabbed me and whispered, "Do you see
those lights?"--I turned around, and there, about fifty yards away and
coming towards us, were about a dozen lights. We talked it over with
the Corporal and decided they must be Germans who had broken through
the tunnel, so the Corporal said, "One of you boys stay here and dig;
and the other two will go back and stop them," but we made him stay,
and Nobby and I went to meet the Bodies. There was a branch tunnel
about thirty yards away, and we hoped to waylay them there; we were
armed with revolvers and their lights made them good targets. We
reached the branch tunnel just before they did, and we had a lively
little scrap with the first two--the others put out their lights when
they heard the pistol shots--anyway, they were several yards back and
they were in no hurry to get into the fun. We lay there and waited for
them, and after things had been quiet for a few minutes they lit their
lights and came on--fortunately the tunnel was only wide enough for one
man, but all the same we were looking for a lively time--they were ten
yards away when there came an awful explosion; a shell had burst
directly over their heads. All I remember was a blinding cloud of dust
and a gust of wind as our tunnel was blown in, and once more I was
buried. We scrambled out and turned to look for our foes, but they had
received the full force of the blow and were safely buried; so we
thanked our lucky stars and went back to our digging. When we reached
our Corporal, we found that he had already dug his way out into the
shaft. We crawled out, and looking up we discovered three more boys at
the top of the shaft--these belonged to the machine gun crew who had
taken up their position there, but a heavy shell had demolished their
gun and buried the men--they were just digging themselves out when we
appeared, and we gave them quite a surprise. One of them said when he
saw us, "Well, where the devil did you come from?" I suppose he
thought that because we came from below we must have so