ling. They seemed to be
detached from his will, and the company's and the captain's will, and
churning in pantomime or not moving at all. If Hugo Mallin had been
called a coward, what of himself? What of the stupid of the company, who
would never learn even the manual of arms correctly, as the
drill-sergeant often said? A new fear made him glance around. He would
not have been surprised to find that he was already in the rear. But
instead he found that he was keeping up, which was all that was
necessary, as more than one other man assured his legs. After thirty or
forty yards most of the legs, if not Peterkin's, had worked out their
shiver and nearly all felt the exhilaration of movement in company. Then
came the sound that generations had drilled for without hearing; the
sound that summons the imagination of man in the thought of how he will
feel and act when he hears it; the sound that is everywhere like the
song snatches of bees driven whizzing through the air.

"That's it! We're under fire! We're under fire!" flashed as crooked
lightning recognition of the sound through every brain.

There was no sign of any enemy; no telling where the bullets came from.

"Such a lot of them, one must surely get me!" Peterkin thought.

Whish-whish! Th-ipp-whing! The refrain gripped his imagination with an
unseen hand. He seemed to be suffocating. He wanted to throw himself
down and hold his hands in front of his head. While Pilzer and Aronson
were not thinking, only running, Peterkin was thinking with the rapidity
of a man falling from a high building. Worse! He did not know how far he
had to go. He was certain only that he was bound to strike ground.

"An inch is as good as a mile!" He recollected the captain's teaching.
"Only one of a thousand bullets fired in war ever kills a man"--but he
was certain that he had heard a million already. Then one passed very
close, its swift breath brushing his cheek with a whistle like a s-s-st
through the teeth. He dodged so hard that he might have dislocated his
neck; he gasped and half stumbled, but realized that he had not been
hit. And he must keep right on going, driven by one fear against
another, in face of those ghastly whispers which the others, for the
most part, in the excitement of a charge, had ceased to hear.

Again he would be sure that his legs, which he was urging so frantically
to their duty, were not playing pantomime. He looked around to find that
he was still keeping up