Occasionally a man fell in the trench and lay in the mud and snow, but the others never ceased for a moment to send bullets into the gray masses which fell back only to come on again.  Nothing but modern weapons, machine guns from which missiles fairly flowed in an unending stream, and rifles which a man fired as fast as he could pull the trigger could check them.  “Why don’t they stop!  Why don’t they stop!” John was shouting to himself through burned lips, and again he shuddered with sick horror, when he saw a whole line of men blown away, as if they had been grain swept by a tornado.

Once they came to the very edge of the trench to be slain there, and the body of a German fell in at John’s very feet.  He never knew how many times they charged, but human flesh and blood must yield, in the end, before unyielding steel, and at last through the crash and confusion the notes of trumpets sounded.  Then the German masses melted away and the heavy white gloom once more enveloped the ground before the trenches from which came faint cries.  The wounded lay thickly there with the dead, but neither side dared to go for them.  An upright human figure would draw at once a hail of bullets.

Several machine guns still purred and crackled, but no reply came.  Presently they, too, ceased, and the silence in front was complete, save for the faint groans and the swish of the drifting snow.  John shivered, and it was not with cold.  His feeling of horror was increasing.  Many men had been killed and as many maimed, and he was sure that all of them had fallen for nothing.

“It’s a victory,” said Carstairs, “isolated and detached, but a victory nevertheless.”

“So it is,” said John, “but it’s just a little segment on a vast curving line of four hundred miles.  Maybe the Germans have taken a trench somewhere else.”

“And maybe we have, at yet another point.  This isn’t much like the war we’ve read about, is it, Scott?  A great battlefield, vast batteries blazing, long lines of infantry in brilliant uniforms advancing, twenty thousand cavalry charging at the gallop the earth reeling under the hoofs of their horses!”

“No, it’s just murder in the dark.”

[Illustration:  “Once they came to the very edge of the trench to be slain there”]

“But a black night would oppress me less than the ghastly whitish glare of the snow.  I can’t see a thing out there, Scott, but those low sounds I hear appall me.”

The wind and the fall of snow alike were increasing in violence.  The great flakes poured in a feathery storm into the trench, and, before them, all things were hidden.  John knew, too, that it was covering the many dead in their front with a blanket of white and that the wounded who were unable to crawl back would probably lie frozen beneath it in the morning.  Once more that shiver of horror and utter repulsion seized him.  Despite himself, he could not control it, and he merely remained quiet until his nerves became steady again.