this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with
all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English
company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line
that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter
annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and of the military
expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this
angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would
be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan would
inevitably follow.

All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this
corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked
at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them,
and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on
and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother
from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of
that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English
artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being
steadily battered into scrap iron.

There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another,
"It is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast
ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British
trenches.

There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these
men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the
German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them.
And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous
host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand
remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing
on against them, column upon column, a gray world of men, ten thousand
of them, as it appeared afterwards.

There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man
improvised a new version of the battle-song, "Good-by, good-by to
Tipperary," ending with "And we shan't get there." And they all went on
firing steadily. The officer pointed out that such an opportunity for
high-class fancy shooting might never occur again; the Tipperary
humorist asked, "What price Sidney Street?" And the few machine guns did
their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead gray bodies
lay in companies and battalions, as