rters had its
principal residence in a commodious and cobwebby cellar, the absence of
the gutters fortunately passed without remark, and the sentry who
watched the looting and the sergeant to whom he reported it were quite
satisfied by the presence of an Engineer officer and his calm assurance
that it was 'all right--orders--an Engineers' job.'

The pump did its work excellently, and a steady stream of muddy water
gushed from its nozzle and flowed down the Headquarters gutter-pipes to
a selected spot well behind the trenches. Unfortunately the pump,
being old-fashioned, was somewhat noisy, and all the packing and oiling
and tinkering failed to silence its clank-clink, clank-clink, as its
arm rose and fell.

The nearest German trench caught the clank-clink, and by a simple
process of deduction and elimination arrived at its meaning and its
location. The pump and the pumpers led a troubled life after that.
Snipers kept an unsteady but never silent series of bullets smacking
into the stones of the ruin, whistling over the communication trench,
and 'whupp'-ing into the mud around both. A light gun took a hand and
plumped a number of rounds each day into the crumbling walls and
rubbish-heaps of stone and brick, and burst shrapnel all over the lot.
The Sappers dodged the snipers by keeping tight and close to cover;
they frustrated the direct-hitting 'Fizz-Bang' shells by a stout
barricade of many thicknesses of sandbags bolstering up the fragment of
wall that hid their shaft and pump, and finally they erected a low roof
over the works and sandbagged that secure against the shrapnel. There
were casualties of course, but these are always in the way of business
with the Sappers and came as a matter of course. The Germans brought
up a trench-mortar next and flung noisy and nerve-wrecking
high-explosive bombs into and all round the ruin, bursting down all the
remaining walls except the sandbagged one and scoring a few more
casualties until the forward trench installed a trench-mortar of their
own, and by a generous return of two bombs to the enemy's one put the
German out of action. A big _minnenwerfer_ came into play next, and
because it could throw a murderous-sized bomb from far behind the
German trench it was too much for the British trench-mortar to tackle.
This brought the gunners into the game, and the harassed infantry (who
were coming to look on the Sapper Subaltern and his works as an
unmitigated nuisance and a m