he
vice-chief of staff.

"I don't think they will!" said Lanstron.

To the others he seemed as cool as ever, even when his maimed hand was
twitching in his pocket. But now, suddenly, his eyes starting as at a
horror, he trembled passionately, his head dropping forward, as if he
would collapse.

"Oh, the murder of it--the murder!" he breathed.

"But they brought it on! Not for theirs, but for ours!" said the
vice-chief of staff, laying his hand on Lanstron's shoulder.

"And we sit here while they go in!" Lanstron added. "There's a kind of
injustice about that which I can't get over. Not one of us here has been
under fire!"

Even the minute of the attack they knew; and just before midnight they
were standing at the window looking out into the night, while the
vice-chief held his watch in hand. In the hush the faint sound of a
dirigible's propeller high up in the heavens, muffled by the fog, was
drowned by the Gray guns opening fire.

* * * * *

Before the mine exploded, by the light of the shell bursts breaking
their vast prisms from central spheres of flame for miles, with the
quick sequence of a moving-picture flicker, Fracasse's men could see one
another's faces, spectral and stiff and pasty white, with teeth gleaming
where jaws had dropped, some eyes half closed by the blinding flashes
and some opened wide as if the lids were paralyzed. Faces and faces! A
sea of faces stretching away down the slope--faces in a trance.

Up over the breastworks, over rocks and splintered timbers, Peterkin and
the judge's son and their comrades clambered. When they moved they were
as a myriad-legged creature, brain numbed, without any sensation except
that of rapids going over a fall. Those in front could not falter, being
pushed on by the pressure of those in the rear. For a few steps they
were under no fire. The scream of their own shells breaking in infernal
pandemonium in front seemed to be a power as irresistible as the rear of
the wedge in driving them on.

Then sounds more hideous than the flight of projectiles broke about them
with the abruptness of lightnings held in the hollow of the Almighty's
hand and suddenly released. The Browns' guns had opened fire. Explosions
were even swifter in sequence than the flashes that revealed the stark
faces. Dust and stones and flying fragments of flesh filled the air. Men
went down in positive paralysis of faculties by the terrific crashes.
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