FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126  
127   128   >>  
motioned to the Sergeant to lead them, and they set off in a long, dotted and irregular line towards the thicket. "Hurry ... them ... up. Hurry!" shouted the Adjutant. And just as the last man had left the bank, and he had started himself, he realised what the Adjutant meant. "Phwhizz ... phwizz ... phwizz." Like malignant wasps the bullets hummed past him. There was a regularity in the discharge and a similarity in the aim that left him no chance to doubt that a machine-gun had been turned on them. "I was a bit of a fool not to have gone first," he said to himself. But the bullets hummed harmlessly by his head and shoulders, and the thought that struck him most forcibly, as he plunged through the cabbages, was the impossibility of realising the consequences if any one of them had been a few inches nearer his head. It momentarily occurred to him to lie down and crawl through the cabbages, trusting to luck that the machine-gun would lose him; but, of course, the only thing was to run for it, and so he ploughed along. Whether the journey occupied more than a minute or not he is unable to say, but it seemed an incredible lapse of time before he reached the copse--and safety. "We shall have some artillery turned on to us in a minute," said the Colonel; "we had better get on with the operation." They debouched from the copse in open order, and advanced in the usual lines of platoons, to attack the hill. The Subaltern loosened his sword in his scabbard, so that when the time came he could draw it more easily. He had already picked up a rifle from some unfortunate. There seemed to be a certainty of a hand-to-hand fight. He did not feel at all eager to kill; on the other hand, he scarcely felt afraid. He just felt as if he grudged the passing of the yards under his feet which separated him from the edge of the wood. The idea of being "stuck" himself never occurred to him. The bullets flew about rather thickly for the first few minutes, but no harm was done, and then the enemy's resistance seemed to die down. There was complete silence for several minutes as our men plodded steadily on. Then, away on the right, the Colonel's whistle sounded, and a halt was called. The enemy had taken fright and had retired, machine-guns and all, before their advance. This little affair, although too small to figure in the communiques at home, was a great personal triumph for the Colonel. The enemy, having broken th
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126  
127   128   >>  



Top keywords:
Colonel
 

machine

 

bullets

 
minutes
 

turned

 

minute

 

hummed

 

Adjutant

 

occurred

 

cabbages


phwizz

 
afraid
 

scarcely

 
passing
 
grudged
 

loosened

 

scabbard

 

Subaltern

 

platoons

 

attack


unfortunate

 

certainty

 

picked

 

easily

 

sounded

 
called
 

fright

 

whistle

 

triumph

 

personal


retired

 

affair

 
figure
 

advance

 

steadily

 

plodded

 

communiques

 

thickly

 

separated

 

silence


broken
 
complete
 

resistance

 

unable

 

chance

 
similarity
 

discharge

 
malignant
 
regularity
 

struck