of the ram were blown to pieces by the burst of a shrapnel
shoulder high; other sections were lifted heavenward by a shell burst in
the earth.

Peterkin fell with a piece of jagged steel embedded in his brain. He had
gone from the quick to the dead so swiftly that he never knew that his
charm had failed. The same explosion got Fracasse, sword in hand, and
another buried him where he lay. The banker's son went a little farther;
the barber's son still farther. Men who were alive hardly realized life,
so mixed were life and death. Infernal imagination goes faint; its
wildest similes grow feeble and banal before such a consummation of
hell.

But the tide keeps on; the torn gaps of the ram are filled by the
rushing legs from the rear. Officers urge and lead. Such are the orders;
such is the duty prescribed; such is human bravery even in these days
when life is sweeter to more men in the joys of mind and body than ever
before. Precision, organization, solidarity in this charge such as the
days of the "death-or-glory" boys never knew! Over the bodies of
Peterkin and the barber's and the banker's sons, plunging through shell
craters, stumbling, staggering, cut by swaths and torn by eddies of red
destruction in their ranks, the tide proceeded, until its hosts were
oftener treading on flesh than on soil. And all they knew was to keep
on--keep on, bayonet in hand, till they reached the redoubt, and there
they were to stay, alive or dead.

In that pulsating, fierce light, while the ground under their feet
trembled with the concussions, Westerling's face was as clear to Marta
as if he were staring in at a furnace door. The lines of breeding and of
restrained authority which gave it distinction had faded. It had the
eager ferocity of the hunt. His short, tense exclamations explained the
stages of progress of the attack as revealed to his sight.

"It cannot fail! No! Impossible! Look at the speed of our gun-fire! But
I judge that we have not been able to silence as many of their guns as
we ought to--they're using shell into our close order. But all the guns
in creation shall not stop us! I have men enough this time--enough,
enough, enough! There! Our shorter-range guns have ceased firing! That
shows we are in the redoubts. The longer-range guns continue. They are
firing beyond the redoubt against any counter-attack, if the Browns try
to recover what they have lost. But every minute brings another
battalion into place. Engineers a