Faintly the town clock was heard striking the hour.  From eight to nine and nine to ten Fracasse’s men waited; waited until the machine was ready and Westerling should throw in the clutch; waited until the troops were in place for the first move before he hurled his battalions forward.  Every pawn of flesh facing the white posts had a thousand thoughts whirling in such a medley that he could be said to have no thought at all, only an impression juggled by destiny.  No one would have confessed what he felt, while physical inactivity gave free rein to mental activity.  That thing of a nation’s nightmare; that thing for which generations had drilled without its materializing; that thing of speculation, of hazard, of horror; that thing of quick action and long-enduring consequences was coming.

They did not know how the captain at their back received his orders; they only heard the note of the whistle, with a command familiar to a trained instinct on the edge of anticipation.  It released a spring in their nerve-centres.  They responded as the wheels respond when the throttle is opened.  Jumping to their feet they broke into a run, bodies bent, heads down, like the peppered silhouette that faced Westerling’s desk.  What they had done repeatedly in drills and manoeuvres they were now doing in war, mechanically as marionettes.

“Come on!  The bullet is not made that can get me!  Come on!” cried the giant Eugene Aronson.

He leaped over a white post and then over the plough, which was also in his path.  Little Peterkin felt his legs trembling.  They seemed to be detached from his will, and the company’s and the captain’s will, and churning in pantomime or not moving at all.  If Hugo Mallin had been called a coward, what of himself?  What of the stupid of the company, who would never learn even the manual of arms correctly, as the drill-sergeant often said?  A new fear made him glance around.  He would not have been surprised to find that he was already in the rear.  But instead he found that he was keeping up, which was all that was necessary, as more than one other man assured his legs.  After thirty or forty yards most of the legs, if not Peterkin’s, had worked out their shiver and nearly all felt the exhilaration of movement in company.  Then came the sound that generations had drilled for without hearing; the sound that summons the imagination of man in the thought of how he will feel and act when he hears it; the sound that is everywhere like the song snatches of bees driven whizzing through the air.

“That’s it!  We’re under fire!  We’re under fire!” flashed as crooked lightning recognition of the sound through every brain.

There was no sign of any enemy; no telling where the bullets came from.

“Such a lot of them, one must surely get me!” Peterkin thought.

Whish-whish!  Th-ipp-whing!  The refrain gripped his imagination with an unseen hand.  He seemed to be suffocating.  He wanted to throw himself down and hold his hands in front of his head.  While Pilzer and Aronson were not thinking, only running, Peterkin was thinking with the rapidity of a man falling from a high building.  Worse!  He did not know how far he had to go.  He was certain only that he was bound to strike ground.