Peterkin fell with a piece of jagged steel embedded in his brain.  He had gone from the quick to the dead so swiftly that he never knew that his charm had failed.  The same explosion got Fracasse, sword in hand, and another buried him where he lay.  The banker’s son went a little farther; the barber’s son still farther.  Men who were alive hardly realized life, so mixed were life and death.  Infernal imagination goes faint; its wildest similes grow feeble and banal before such a consummation of hell.

But the tide keeps on; the torn gaps of the ram are filled by the rushing legs from the rear.  Officers urge and lead.  Such are the orders; such is the duty prescribed; such is human bravery even in these days when life is sweeter to more men in the joys of mind and body than ever before.  Precision, organization, solidarity in this charge such as the days of the “death-or-glory” boys never knew!  Over the bodies of Peterkin and the barber’s and the banker’s sons, plunging through shell craters, stumbling, staggering, cut by swaths and torn by eddies of red destruction in their ranks, the tide proceeded, until its hosts were oftener treading on flesh than on soil.  And all they knew was to keep on—­keep on, bayonet in hand, till they reached the redoubt, and there they were to stay, alive or dead.

In that pulsating, fierce light, while the ground under their feet trembled with the concussions, Westerling’s face was as clear to Marta as if he were staring in at a furnace door.  The lines of breeding and of restrained authority which gave it distinction had faded.  It had the eager ferocity of the hunt.  His short, tense exclamations explained the stages of progress of the attack as revealed to his sight.

“It cannot fail!  No!  Impossible!  Look at the speed of our gun-fire!  But I judge that we have not been able to silence as many of their guns as we ought to—­they’re using shell into our close order.  But all the guns in creation shall not stop us!  I have men enough this time—­enough, enough, enough!  There!  Our shorter-range guns have ceased firing!  That shows we are in the redoubts.  The longer-range guns continue.  They are firing beyond the redoubt against any counter-attack, if the Browns try to recover what they have lost.  But every minute brings another battalion into place.  Engineers and guns will follow.  The war is as good as won!”

He caught at Marta’s hand, but she drew away; and her start of revulsion at his touch was almost coincident with a start on his part for another reason.  A huge shadow shot at railway-train speed over their heads.  Something very like fear flashed into his expression.

“One of our dirigibles!” he exclaimed.  “I confess it came so near that it gave me a sort of shock, too.”

“Only a shadow with no death in it,” she said.  “And there is death in every flash there on the range.  General Westerling, have you ever been under fire?” she asked suddenly.