The bullets from the automatics missing one mark were certain to find another, perhaps four or five in a row, such was their velocity and power of penetration.  Where shells made gaps and tore holes in the human mass, the automatics cut with the regularity of the driven teeth of a comb.  The men who escaped all the forms of slaughter and staggered on to the ruins of the redoubt, pressed their weight on top of those in the craters or hugged behind the pyramids of debris, and even made breastworks from the bodies of the dead.  The more that banked up, the more fruitless the efforts of the officers to restore order in the frantic medley of shell screams and explosions at a time when a minute seemed an age.

Meanwhile, between them—­this banked-up force at the charge’s end—­and the Brown redoubt with its automatics, the Gray gunners were making a zone of shell bursts in order to give the soldiers time to make their hold of the ground they had gained secure.  Through this zone Stransky and his men were to lead the Browns in a counter-attack.

At the very height of the Gray charge, when all the reserves were in, dark objects fell out of the heavens, and where they dropped earth and flesh were mingled in the maceration.  Like some giant reptile with its vertebrae breaking, gouged and torn and pinioned, the charge stopped, in writhing, throbbing confusion.  Those on the outer circle of explosions were thrown against their fellows, who surged back in another direction from an explosion in the opposite quarter.  From the rear the pressure weakened; the human hammer was no longer driving the ram.  Blinded by the lightnings and dust, dizzy from concussions and noise, too blank of mind to be sane or insane, the atoms of the bulk of the charge in natural instinct turned from their goal and toward the place whence they had come, with death from all sides still buffeting them.  Staggeringly, at first, they went, for want of initiative in their paralysis; then rapidly, as the law of self-preservation asserted itself in wild impulse.

As sheep driven over a precipice they had advanced; as men they fled.  There was no longer any command, no longer any cohesion, except of legs struggling in and out over the uneven footing of dead and wounded, while they felt another pressure, that of the mass of the Browns in pursuit.  Of all those of Fracasse’s company whom we know, only the judge’s son and Jacob Pilzer were alive.  Stained with blood and dust, his teeth showing in a grimace of mocking hate of all humankind, Pilzer’s savagery ran free of the restraint of discipline and civilized convention.  Striking right and left, he forced his way out of the region of shell fire and still kept on.  Clubbing his rifle, he struck down one officer who tried to detain him; but another officer, quicker than he, put a revolver bullet through his head.

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