other points in our
battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat,
but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and
of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a
salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English
force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned,
and Sedan would inevitably follow.

All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against
this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The
men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets
about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the
shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and
tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did
the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The
English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it
was being steadily battered into scrap iron.

There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another,
"It is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast
ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British
trenches.

There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of
these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated
hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and
destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches
that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of
the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German
infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey
world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.

There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man
improvised a new version of the battlesong, "Good-bye, good-bye to
Tipperary," ending with "And we shan't get there". And they all went
on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity
for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans
dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, "What price
Sidney Street?" And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody
knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and
battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and
stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.

"World without end. Amen," said one of