“We could have emplaced two lines of automatics, one above the other!” exclaimed the chief of artillery.

“But that would have given too much of a climb for the infantry in going in—­delayed the rush,” said Lanstron.

“If they should stick—­if we couldn’t drive them back!” exclaimed the vice-chief of staff.

“I don’t think they will!” said Lanstron.

To the others he seemed as cool as ever, even when his maimed hand was twitching in his pocket.  But now, suddenly, his eyes starting as at a horror, he trembled passionately, his head dropping forward, as if he would collapse.

“Oh, the murder of it—­the murder!” he breathed.

“But they brought it on!  Not for theirs, but for ours!” said the vice-chief of staff, laying his hand on Lanstron’s shoulder.

“And we sit here while they go in!” Lanstron added.  “There’s a kind of injustice about that which I can’t get over.  Not one of us here has been under fire!”

Even the minute of the attack they knew; and just before midnight they were standing at the window looking out into the night, while the vice-chief held his watch in hand.  In the hush the faint sound of a dirigible’s propeller high up in the heavens, muffled by the fog, was drowned by the Gray guns opening fire.

* * * * *

Before the mine exploded, by the light of the shell bursts breaking their vast prisms from central spheres of flame for miles, with the quick sequence of a moving-picture flicker, Fracasse’s men could see one another’s faces, spectral and stiff and pasty white, with teeth gleaming where jaws had dropped, some eyes half closed by the blinding flashes and some opened wide as if the lids were paralyzed.  Faces and faces!  A sea of faces stretching away down the slope—­faces in a trance.

Up over the breastworks, over rocks and splintered timbers, Peterkin and the judge’s son and their comrades clambered.  When they moved they were as a myriad-legged creature, brain numbed, without any sensation except that of rapids going over a fall.  Those in front could not falter, being pushed on by the pressure of those in the rear.  For a few steps they were under no fire.  The scream of their own shells breaking in infernal pandemonium in front seemed to be a power as irresistible as the rear of the wedge in driving them on.

Then sounds more hideous than the flight of projectiles broke about them with the abruptness of lightnings held in the hollow of the Almighty’s hand and suddenly released.  The Browns’ guns had opened fire.  Explosions were even swifter in sequence than the flashes that revealed the stark faces.  Dust and stones and flying fragments of flesh filled the air.  Men went down in positive paralysis of faculties by the terrific crashes.  Sections of the ram were blown to pieces by the burst of a shrapnel shoulder high; other sections were lifted heavenward by a shell burst in the earth.