a rifle
on the German parapet could have brought down a man with every shot. Yet
none fell; all were going forward.

I would watch the line over a hundred yards of breadth immediately in
front of me, determined not to have my attention diverted to other parts
of the attack and to make the most of this unique opportunity of
observation in the concrete.

The average layman conceives of a charge as a rush. So it is on the
drill-ground, but not where its movement is timed to arrival on the
second before a hissing storm of death, and the attackers must not be
winded when there is hot work awaiting them in close encounters around
traverses and at the mouths of dugouts. No one was sprinting ahead of
his companions; no one crying, "Come on, boys!" no one swinging his
steel helmet aloft, for he needed it for protection from any sudden
burst of shrapnel. All were advancing at a rapid pace, keeping line and
intervals except where they had to pass around shell-craters.

If this charge had none of the display of other days it had all the more
thrill because of its workmanlike and regulated progress. No
get-drunk-six-days-of-the-week-and-fight-like-h--l-on-Sunday business of
the swashbuckling age before Thiepval. Every man must do his part as
coolly as if he were walking a tight rope with no net to catch him, with
death to be reckoned with in the course of a systematic evolution.

"Very good! A trifle eager there! Excellent!" Howell sweeping the field
with his glasses was speaking in the expert appreciation of a football
coach watching his team at practice. "No machine guns yet," he said for
the second time, showing the apprehension that was in his mind.

I, too, had been listening for the staccato of the machine gun, which is
the most penetrating, mechanical and wicked, to my mind, of all the
instruments of the terrible battle orchestra, as sinister as the
clicking of a switch which you know will derail a passenger train. The
men were halfway to the German trench, now. Two and a half minutes of
the allotted five had passed. In my narrow sector of vision not one man
had yet fallen. They might have been in a manoeuver and their goal a
deserted ditch. Looking right and left my eye ran along the line of
sturdy, moving backs which seemed less concerned than the spectator. Not
only because you were on their side but as the reward of their
steadiness, you wanted them to conquer that stretch of first-line
fortifications. Any second yo