Our men still crouched while these things fell upon
them.
"I thought I had been blown to bits," one of them told me. "I was a
quaking fear, with my head in the earth. I kept saying, 'Christ! . . .
Christ!'"
When the earth and smoke had settled again it was seen that the
enemy's redoubt had ceased to exist. In its place, where there had
been a crisscross of trenches and sand-bag shelters for their machine-
guns and a network of barbed wire, there was now an enormous crater,
hollowed deep with shelving sides surrounded by tumbled earth heaps
which had blocked up the enemy's trenches on either side of the
position, so that they could not rush into the cavern and take
possession. It was our men who "rushed" the crater and lay there
panting in its smoking soil.
Our generals had asked for trouble when they destroyed that redoubt,
and our men had it. Infuriated by a massacre of their garrison in the
mine-explosion and by the loss of their spear-head, the Germans kept
up a furious bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in
bursts of gun-fire which tossed our earthworks about and killed and
wounded many men.
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