n should appear. The finger moved steadily over
as the Subaltern stumbled into sight--and the solid earth heaved
convulsively, shuddered, and rocked and shook to the roaring blast of
the explosion.

The shock and the rush of air from the tunnel-mouth caught the
Subaltern, staggering to his knees, and flung him headlong. And as he
picked himself up again the air darkened with whizzing clods and mud
and dust and stones and dirt that rained down from the sky. Before the
echoes of the explosion had died away, before the last fragments and
debris had fallen, there came the sound of another roar, the bellowing
thunder of the British guns throwing a storm of shell and shrapnel
between the German supports and the ruined trench. That, and another
sound, told the Subaltern that the full fruits of his work were to be
fully reaped--the sound of the guns and of the full, deep-chested,
roaring cheers of the British infantry as they swarmed from their
trenches and rushed to occupy the crater of the explosion.

* * * * *

Later in the day, when the infantry had made good their possession of
the place, had sandbagged and fortified it to stand against the
expected counter-attacks, the Subaltern went to look over the ground
and see at first and close hand the results of his explosion.
Technically, he found it interesting; humanly, it was merely sickening.
The ground was one weltering chaos and confusion of tossed earth-heaps
and holes, of broken beams and jagged-ended planks, of flung sandbags
and wrecked barricading. Of trench or barricade, as trench and
barricade, there remained, simply, no sign. The wreckage was scattered
thick with a dreadful debris of dead bodies, of bloody clothing, of
helmets and broken rifles, burst packs and haversacks, bayonets,
water-bottles, and shattered equipments. The Ambulance men were busy,
but there were still many dead and dying and wounded to be removed,
wounded with torn flesh and mangled limbs, dead and dying with scorched
and smouldering clothes. The infantry, hastily digging and filling
sandbags and throwing up parapets on the far edge of the reeking
explosion pit, had found many bodies caught in the descending avalanche
of earth or buried in the collapsed trenches and dug-outs; and here and
there, amid the confusion, a foot or a hand protruding stark from some
earth-heap marked the death-place of other victims. The whole scene
was one of death and desolation,