mbled the maxim faintly. 'Tutt, tutt!'

THE MINE

'_. . . a mine was successfully exploded under a section of the enemy's
trench. . . ._'--ACTUAL EXTRACT FROM AN OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

Work on the sap-head had been commenced on what the Captain of the
Sappers called 'a beautiful night,' and what anyone else outside a
lunatic asylum would have described with the strongest adjectives
available in exactly the opposite sense. A piercing wind was blowing
in gusts of driving sleet and rain, it was pitch dark--'black as the
inside of a cow,' as the Corporal put it--and it was bitterly cold.
But, since all these conditions are exactly those most calculated to
make difficult the work of an enemy's sentries and look-outs, and the
first work of sinking a shaft is one which it is highly desirable
should be unobserved by an enemy, the Sapper Captain's satisfaction may
be understood.

The sap-head was situated amongst the ruins of a cottage a few yards
behind the forward firing trench, and by the time a wet daylight had
dawned the Sappers had dug themselves well underground, had securely
planked up the walls of the shaft, and had cut a connecting gallery
from the ruins to the communication trench. All this meant that their
work was fairly free from observation, and the workers reasonably safe
from bombs and bullets, so that the officer in charge had good cause
for the satisfaction with which he made his first report.

His first part of the work had been a matter of plans and maps, of
compass and level, of observing the ground--incidentally dodging the
bullets of the German snipers who caught glimpses of his crawling
form--by day, and of intricate and exact figuring and calculating by
night, in the grimy cellar of another ruined house by the light of a
candle, stuck in an empty bottle.

Thereafter he spent all his waking hours (and many of his sleeping ones
as well) in a thick suit of clayey mud; he lived like a mole in his
mine gallery or his underground cellar, saw the light only when he
emerged to pass from his work to his sleep or meals, and back to his
work, and generally gave himself, his whole body and brain and being,
to the correct driving of a shallow burrow straight to the selected
point under the enemy trench a hundred and odd yards away. He was a
youngish man, and this was the first job of any importance that had
been wholly and solely entrusted to him. It was not only his anxiety
to make a creditable sho