strand.

With a calmness which bespoke experience, despite the light of battle
which blazed in their eyes, the new men brought and distributed fresh
bandoliers of ammunition to those who had gone before, then took their
places alongside to aid in its expenditure. The lines were not straight.
They zigzagged a trifle. There was no time for chalk-mark adjustment or
inspection, and the moment a panting body struck the ground after a
forward rush, the earth began to fly on the spot beneath the chop of the
trench-digging tools, and the hot rifles to speak.

Men growled, muttered and shouted. Under the fighting fog that beset
each one in its own way, there came snatches of song, humming and
whistling. There were those, too, who fought silently, as though deeply
wrapped in thought, and there was bickering when a hasty comrade crowded
too close for free operation of the flying breechbolts; yet the faces
were ever turned to the front, except when they turned to the sky or the
earth, and nerveless hands fell sprawling with half-emptied rifles.

Where officers, binoculars in hand, bent hastily to the line, men
detached themselves at intervals, and clawing at their belts, seized the
wire cutters pendant there and crawled forward. Now and then one of the
creeping ones would spring into the air and topple over, but the rest,
apparently paying no heed, continued on their way toward where the
Germans had erected wire entanglements to hold the stormers under the
blast of the enemy's fire.

Ahead, the trenches of the Germans crackled and spat with fury, and even
under the ceaseless rain of shrapnel from above the assaulting lines the
enemy kept his place. The firing line had thickened until it was a solid
mass, one man deep, and in the rear line after line had sprung to its
feet and was closing up in support to the crucial assault. At the
trenches of the defenders, batteries, with horses falling and being cut
away in an instant, dashed to the line, unlimbered and poured in their
scattering salutations of zero shrapnel to the men in front.

Came a clank and rattle of bayonets snapped onto the muzzles of the
assaulting line; then, with a last frenzied emptying of magazines, the
lines sprang to foot, and with hoarse voices screeching at top note, the
slender line charged forward.

The trenches were lined with the defenders in an instant. The rifle fire
redoubled in intensity and the artillery, which had come up to stem the
tide, or as