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over the next traverse. Two grenades, two explosions, a point so often taught but so easily and fatally forgotten. Atkins leads the way round the corner to find a short run of empty trench reeking of freshly-turned earth, wet wood and explosive. Kersley and Pryce-Owen pause at the next turning, and the bombers throw two more grenades. This time something is different. There is the scuffling of feet on duckboards before the grenades explode, and Atkins arrives in the next section of trench at the same time as a German senior NCO enters it from the other side.
    Although he has been in France for about two years, most of the Germans Atkins has seen have been either dead or prisoners. There is certainly no mistaking this one’s purpose or determination. He has a trim beard, and wears a cap rather than the coal-scuttle helmets of the two soldiers behind him. A thick row of silver braid round his collar marks his rank; on his left breast is an Iron Cross. He fires his automatic pistol twice: time stands still as the empty cartridge cases catch the light as they spin up and away. There is a crash behind Atkins as Abraham falls forwards, hit in the chest, and then the German’s momentum carries him straight onto Atkins’s bayonet. He has no time to think, but leans forward onto his rifle, setting the bayonet firmly: he then gives it a quarter-turn (‘making the wound not only fatal, but immortal’, as base warriors, who have never seen a trench, like to say) and tugs it out easily enough. The German falls backwards with blood pulsing from his throat, but it is a measure of his resolve that he fires once more, at the very doors of death, missing Atkins by a hair’s breadth. Then he drums his heels on the duckboards and is still.
    The other two Germans take the hint, drop their rifles and raise their hands, crying
Kamerad.
There is a deafening bang just behind Atkins as Jarvis shoots one straight between the eyes: only the seconds spent working his bolt to chamber another round enable Atkins to grab his rifle by the fore-end, jerk the muzzle upwards and yell: ‘No, no! They’ve jacked!’ Jarvis stops at once, like a drunk suddenly sobering up, turns to look at Abraham lying on the trench floor too obviously dead, swears, spits, slings his rifle and takes another grenade out of his waistcoat. He is just about to throw it when there is a loud shout of ‘Manchester, Manchester’ from behind the next traverse. And round it stalks a little corporal with a toothless grin, a grenade in his hand, and a lanky bayonet man behind him. ‘’Ello, choom,’ he says. The junction is complete. 1

WITH THE RANK AND PAY OF A SAPPER
    I n one sense military engineering underwent no revolution in the First World War. Sappers, then as now, helped the army to fight, move and live. When the army was in retreat they blew up bridges. The first engineer VCs of the war were won on 23 August 1914 by Lance Corporal Charles Jarvis, who worked single-handed under heavy fire for an hour and a half to destroy the lock bridge at Jemappes on the Mons-Condé canal, and by Captain Theodore Wright, who made repeated though unsuccessful attempts to blow up the nearby road bridge at La Mariette, swinging hand over hand beneath it. When the army advanced, they threw pontoons across rivers whose bridges had been demolished by the Germans. At Vailly on the Aisne, on 14 September, ‘the passage of the bridge [was] kept open and controlled with great coolness’ by Captain Wright, who was killed by a shell. 163 When opportunity offered they replaced pontoons with permanent structures, strengthened old bridges to bear new loads, or added fresh crossings to water obstacles which compelled the British to fight astride or across them.
    Engineers provided the brains (though not always the muscle) behind the construction of everything from field fortifications to roads and camps, and many spent their time in the familiar