ear as best they could and crawled to any
cover from the bursting shells; the dead lay where they fell. The
detachments were reduced to skeleton crews. One Section Commander laid
and fired a gun; another, with a smashed thigh, sat and set fuses until
he fainted from loss of blood and from pain. The Battery Commander
took the telephone himself and sent the telephonist to help the guns;
and when a bursting shell tore out one side of the sandbags of the
dug-out the Battery Commander rescued himself and the instrument from
the wreckage, mended the broken wire, and sat in the open, alternately
listening at the receiver and yelling exhortation and advice to the
gunners through the Sergeant-Major's megaphone. The Sergeant-Major had
gone on the run to round up every available man, and brought back at
the double the Battery cooks, officers' grooms, mess orderlies and
servants. The slackening fire of the Battery spurted again and ran up
to something like its own rate. And the Major cheered the men on to a
last effort, shouting the Forward Officer's message that the attack was
failing, was breaking, was being wiped out mainly by the Battery's fire.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the tornado of shell-fire about
them ceased, shifted its storm-centre, and fell roaring and crashing
and hammering on an empty hedge and ditch a full three hundred yards
away.

And at the same moment the Major shouted exultingly. 'They're done!'
he bellowed down the megaphone; 'they're beat! The attack--and he fell
back on the Forward Officer's own words--'the attack is blotted out.'

Whereat the panting gunners cheered faintly and short-windedly, and
took contentedly the following string of orders to lengthen the range
and slacken the rate of fire. And the Battery made shift to move its
dead from amongst the gun and wagon wheels, to bandage and tie up its
wounded with 'first field dressings,' to shuffle and sort the
detachments and redistribute the remaining men in fair proportion
amongst the remaining guns, to telephone the Brigade Headquarters to
ask for stretcher-bearers and ambulance, and more shells--doing it all,
as it were, with one hand while the other kept the guns going, and the
shells pounding down their appointed paths.

For the doing of two or more things at once, and doing them rapidly,
exactly, and efficiently, the while in addition highly unpleasant
things are being done to them, is all a part of the Gunners' game of