Feller’s and Stransky’s shouts rose together in a peculiar unity of direction and full of the fellowship they had found in their first exchange of glances.

“You engineers, make ready!”

“Hand-grenades to the men under the tree!  That’s where they’re going to try for it—­no wall to climb over there!”

“You engineers, take your rifles—­and bayonet into anything that wears gray!”

“Get back, you men by the tree, to avoid their hand-grenades!  Form up behind them, everybody!”

“No matter if they do get in at first!  Back, you men, from under the tree!”

There was not a single rifle-shot.  In a silence like that before the word to fire in a duel, all orders were heard and the more readily obeyed because Dellarme’s foresight had impressed their sense upon the men in his quiet way.

The sand-bags by the tree were blown up by the Grays.  Then, before the dust had hardly settled, came a half score of hand-grenades thrown by the first men of a Gray wedge, scrambling as they were pushed through the breach by the pressure of the mass behind.  In that final struggle of one set of men to gain and another to hold a position, guns or automatics or long-range bullets played no part.  It was the grapple of cold steel with cold steel and muscle with muscle, in a billowing, twisting mob of wrestlers, with no sound from throats but straining breaths; with no quarter, no distinction of person, and bloodshot eyes and faces hot with the effort of brute strength striving, in primitive desperation, to kill in order not to be killed.  The cloud of rocking, writhing arms and shoulders was neither going forward nor backward.  Its movement was that of a vortex, while the gray stream kept on pouring through the breach as if it were only the first flood from some gray lake on the other side of the breastwork.

Marta had come to the edge of the veranda, at once drawn and repelled, feeling the fearful suspense of the combat, the savage horror of it, and herself uttering sounds like the straining breaths of the men.  What a place for her to be!  But she did not think of that.  She was there.  The dreadful alchemy of war had made her a stranger to herself.  She was mad; they were mad; all the world was mad!

One minute—­two, perhaps—­not three—­and the thing was over.  She saw the Grays being crushed back and realized that the Browns had won, when a last detail of the lessening tumult fixed her attention with its gladiatorial simplicity.  Here, indeed, it was a case of man to man with the weapons nature gave them.

Standing higher than the others on the edge of the breach was that giant who had brought Grandfather Fragini in pickaback, looking a young god on an escarpment of rock on Olympus.  His great nose showed in silhouette at intervals of wrestling lurches back and forth as he tugged at the rifle of a thick-set soldier of the Grays with a liver patch on the cheek that made his face hideous enough for an incarnation of war’s savagery.  At last Jacob Pilzer tumbled backward over the breastwork.  Unlucky Pilzer!  That bronze cross was further away than ever for him, while Stransky shook the trophy of a captured rifle aloft, a torn sleeve revealing the weaving muscles of his powerful arm.