g redoubt, and then, as Major Von und Zu pleasantly observed,
"the English pigs shall to gehenna-fire quickly come."

The major was so well pleased with the way things had gone that he
permitted himself a very low and guttural chuckle; in another ten
minutes success would be assured. He half turned his head round to
whisper a caution about some detail of the sandbag business to the big
sergeant-major, Karl Heinz, who was crawling just behind him. At that
instant Karl Heinz leapt into the air with a scream that rent through
the night and through all the roaring of the artillery. He cried in a
terrible voice, "The Glory of the Lord!" and plunged and pitched
forward, stone dead. They said that his face as he stood up there and
cried aloud was as if it had been seen through a sheet of flame.

"They" were one or two out of the few who got back to the German lines.
Most of the Prussians stayed in the ploughed field. Karl Heinz's scream
had frozen the blood of the English soldiers, but it had also ruined
the major's plans. He and his men, caught all unready, clumsy with the
burdens that they carried, were shot to pieces; hardly a score of them
returned. The rest of the force were attended to by an English burying
party. According to custom the dead men were searched before they were
buried, and some singular relies of the campaign were found upon them,
but nothing so singular as Karl Heinz's diary.

He had been keeping it for some time. It began with entries about
bread and sausage and the ordinary incidents of the trenches; here
and there Karl wrote about an old grandfather, and a big china pipe,
and pinewoods and roast goose. Then the diarist seemed to get fidgety
about his health. Thus:

April 17.--Annoyed for some days by murmuring sounds in my head. I
trust I shall not become deaf, like my departed uncle Christopher.

April 20.--The noise in my head grows worse; it is a humming sound.
It distracts me; twice I have failed to hear the captain and have
been reprimanded.

April 22.--So bad is my head that I go to see the doctor. He speaks
of tinnitus, and gives me an inhaling apparatus that shall reach, he
says, the middle ear.

April 25.--The apparatus is of no use. The sound is now become like
the booming of a great church bell. It reminds me of the bell at St.
Lambart on that terrible day of last August.

April 26.--I could swear that it is the bell of St. Lambart that I
hear all the time