hey
retreated. And the Grays would not endure this shower-bath long without
going one way or the other. He gave the order to fix bayonets, and
hardly was it obeyed when he saw flashes of steel through the shrapnel
smoke as the Grays fixed theirs. The Grays had five hundred yards to go;
the Browns had the time that it takes running men to cover the distance
in which to stop the Grays.

"We'll spear any of them who has the luck to get this far!" whispered
Stransky to his rifle. The sentence was spoken in the midst of a salvo
of shrapnel cracks, which he did not hear. He heard nothing, thought
nothing, except to kill.

The Gray batteries on the plain, having taken up a new position and
being reinforced, played on the crest at top speed instantly the Gray
line rose and started up the slope at the run. With the purpose of
confusing no less than killing, they used percussion, which burst on
striking the ground, as well as shrapnel, which burst by a time-fuse in
the air. Fountains of sod and dirt shot upward to meet descending sprays
of bullets. The concussions of the earth shook the aim of Dellarme's
men, blinded by smoke and dust, as they fired through a fog at bent
figures whose legs were pumping fast in dim pantomime.

But the guns of the Browns, also, have word that the charge has begun.
The signal corporal is waiting for the gesture from Dellarme agreed upon
as an announcement. The Brown artillery commander cuts his fuses two
hundred and fifty yards shorter. He, too, uses percussion for moral
effect.

Half of the distance from the foot to the crest of the knoll Fracasse's
men have gone in face of the hot, sizzling tornado of bullets, when
there is a blast of explosions in their faces with all the chaotic and
irresistible force of a volcanic eruption. Not only are they in the
midst of the first lot of the Browns' shells at the shorter range, but
one Gray battery has either made a mistake in cutting its fuses or
struck a streak of powder below standard, and its shells burst among
those whom it is aiming to assist.

The ground seems rising under the feet of Fracasse's company; the air is
split and racked and wrenched and torn with hideous screams of invisible
demons. The men stop; they act on the uncontrollable instinct of
self-preservation against an overwhelming force of nature. A few without
the power of locomotion drop, faces pressed to the ground. The rest flee
toward a shoulder of the slope through the instinct