u expected to see the first shell-burst of
the answering German barrage break in the midst of them.

Then came the first sharp, metallic note which there is no mistaking,
audible in the midst of shell-screams and gun-crashes, off to the right,
chilling your heart, quickening your observation with awful curiosity
and drawing your attention away from the men in front as you looked for
signs of a machine gun's gathering of a human harvest. Rat-tat-tat-tat
in quick succession, then a pause before another series instead of
continuous and slower cracks, and you knew that it was not a German but
a British machine gun farther away than you had thought.

More than ever you rejoiced in every one of the bursts of stored
lightning thick as fireflies in the blanket of smoke over the German
trench, for every one meant a shower of bullets to keep down enemy
machine guns. The French say "_Belle!_" when they see such a barrage,
and beautiful is the word for it to those men who were going across the
field toward this shell-made nimbus looking too soft in the bright
sunlight to have darts of death. All the shell-bursts seemed to be in a
breadth of twenty or thirty yards. How could guns firing at a range of
from two to five thousand yards attain such accuracy!

The men were three-quarters of the distance, now. As they drew nearer to
the barrage another apprehension numbed your thought. You feared to see
a "short"--one of the shells from their own guns which did not carry far
enough bursting among the men--and this, as one English soldier who had
been knocked over by a short said, with dry humor, was "very
discouraging, sir, though I suppose it is well meant." A terrible thing,
that, to the public, killing your own men with your own shells. It is
better to lose a few of them in this way than many from German machine
guns by lifting the barrage too soon, but fear of public indignation had
its influence in the early days of British gunnery. The better the
gunnery the closer the infantry can go and the greater its confidence. A
shell that bursts fifteen or twenty yards short means only the slightest
fault in length of fuse, error of elevation, or fault in registry, back
where the muzzles are pouring out their projectiles from the other side
of the slope. And there were no shorts that day. Every shell that I saw
burst was "on." It was perfect gunnery.

Now it seemed that the men were going straight into the blanket over the
trenches still cu