four men next in line to him. The excuse may be insufficient
for those who have never witnessed at very close hand the instant and
terrible destruction of four companions with whom they have eaten and
slept and talked and moved and had their intimate being for many
months; but those who have known such happenings will understand.
Bunthrop's sergeant understood, and because he was a good sergeant and
had the instinct for the right handling of men--it must have been an
instinct, because, up to a year before, he had been ledger clerk in a
City office and had handled nothing more alive than columns of figures
in a book--he issued exactly the order that appealed exactly to
Bunthrop's terror and roused him from a shivering embodiment of fear to
a live thinking and order-obeying private. "Get up and sling some of
those sandbags back on the parapet, Bunthrop!" he said, "and see if you
can't make some decent cover for yourself. You've nothing there that
would stop a half-crippled Hun jumping in on top of you." When he came
back along the trench five minutes later he found Bunthrop feverishly
busy re-piling sandbags and strengthening the parapet, ducking hastily
and crouching low when a shell roared past overhead, but hurriedly
resuming work the instant it had passed. Then came the fresh German
attack, preceded by five minutes' intense artillery fire, concentrated
on the half-wrecked trench. The inferno of noise, the rush and roar of
the approaching shells, the crash and earth-shaking thunder of their
explosions, the ear-splitting cracks overhead of high-explosive
shrapnel, the drone and whirr and thump of their flying fragments--the
whole racking, roaring, deafening, sense-destroying tempest of noise
was too much for Bunthrop's nerve. He flung down and flattened himself
to the trench bottom again, squeezing himself close to the earth,
submerged and drowned in a sweeping wave of panic fear. He gave no heed
to the orders of his platoon commander, the shouting of his sergeant,
the stir that ran along the trench, the flat spitting reports of the
rifles that began to crack rapidly in a swiftly increasing volume of
fire. A huge fragment of shell came down and struck the trench bottom
with a suggestively violent thud a foot from his head. Half sick with
the instant thought, "If it had been a foot this way!..." half crazed
with the sense of openness to such a missile, Bunthrop rose to his
knees, pressing close to the forward parapet, and