Meanwhile, outside his dugout, life was speeding up at a dizzying rate.  The German artillery had sprung to sudden and wholesale activity.  Far to the right of the Here-We-Come regiment’s trenches a haze had begun to crawl along the ground and to send snaky tendrils high in air-tendrils that blended into a single grayish-green wall as they moved forward.  The hazewall’s gray-green was shot by yellow and purple tinges as the sun’s weak rays touched it.  To the left of the Here-We-Comes, and then in front of them, appeared the same wall of billowing gas.

The Here-We-Comes were ready for it with their hastily donned masks.  But there was no need of the precaution.  By one of the sudden wind—­freaks so common in the story of the war, the gas-cloud was cleft in two by a swirling breeze, and it rolled dankly on, to right and left, leaving the central trenches clear.

Now, an artillery barrage, accompanied or followed by a gas-demonstration, can mean but one thing:  a general attack.  Therefore telephonic word came to the detachments to left and right of the Here-We-Comes, to fall back, under cover of the gas-cloud, to safer positions.  Two dogs were sent, with the same order, to the Here-We-Comes. (One of the dogs was gassed.  A bit of shrapnel found the other.)

Thus it was that the Here-We-Comes were left alone (though they did not know it), to hold the position,—­with no support on either side, and with a mere handful of men wherewith to stem the impending rush.

On the heels of the dispersing gas-cloud, and straight across the half-mile or less of broken ground, came a line of gray.  In five successive waves, according to custom, the boches charged.  Each wave hurled itself forward as fast as efficiency would let it, in face of the opposing fire, and as far as human endurance would be goaded.  Then it went down, and its survivors attached themselves to the succeeding wave.

Hence, by the time the fifth and mightiest wave got into motion, it was swelled by the survivors of all four of its predecessors and was an all-but-resistless mass of shouting and running men.

The rifles and machine-guns of the Here-We-Comes played merrily into the advancing gray swarms, stopping wave after wave, and at last checking the fifth and “master” wave almost at the very brink of the Franco-American parapet.

“That’s how they do!” Mahan pantingly explained to a rather shaky newcomer, as the last wave fell back.  “They count on numbers and bullrushes to get them there.  If they’d had ten thousand men, in that rush, instead of five thousand, they’d have got us.  And if they had twice as many men in their whole army as they have, they’d win this war.  But praise be, they haven’t twice as many!  That is one of the fifty-seven reasons why the Allies are going to lick Germany.”

Mahan talked jubilantly.  The same jubilation ran all along the line of victors.  But the colonel and his staff were not rejoicing.  They had just learned of the withdrawal of the forces to either side of them, and they knew they themselves could not hope to stand against a second and larger charge.