them, as the mine
exploded, split and heaved heavenward. But those in the rear, slapped in
the face by the concussion, kept on, driven by the pressure of the mass
at their backs, and, in turn, plunged forward on their stomachs in the
seams and furrows of the mine's havoc. The mass thickened as the flood
of bodies and legs banked up, in keeping with Westerling's plan to have
"enough to hold."

Now the automatics and the rifles from the redoubt to which the Browns
had fallen back opened fire. So close together were these
bullet-machines that the orbit of each one's swing made a spray of only
a few yards' breadth over the old redoubt, where the Browns' gun-fire
had not for a moment ceased its persistent shelling, with increasingly
large and solid targets of flesh for their practice. The thing for these
targets to do, they knew, was to intrench and begin to return the
infantry and automatics' fire. Desperately, with the last effort of
courage, they rose in the attempt--rose into playing hose streams of
bullets whose close hiss was a steady undertone between shell bursts. In
the garish, jumping light brave officers impulsively stood up to hearten
their commands in their work, and dropped with half-uttered urgings,
threats, and oaths on their lips.

The bullets from the automatics missing one mark were certain to find
another, perhaps four or five in a row, such was their velocity and
power of penetration. Where shells made gaps and tore holes in the human
mass, the automatics cut with the regularity of the driven teeth of a
comb. The men who escaped all the forms of slaughter and staggered on to
the ruins of the redoubt, pressed their weight on top of those in the
craters or hugged behind the pyramids of debris, and even made
breastworks from the bodies of the dead. The more that banked up, the
more fruitless the efforts of the officers to restore order in the
frantic medley of shell screams and explosions at a time when a minute
seemed an age.

Meanwhile, between them--this banked-up force at the charge's end--and
the Brown redoubt with its automatics, the Gray gunners were making a
zone of shell bursts in order to give the soldiers time to make their
hold of the ground they had gained secure. Through this zone Stransky
and his men were to lead the Browns in a counter-attack.

At the very height of the Gray charge, when all the reserves were in,
dark objects fell out of the heavens, and where they dropped earth and
fle