One of the Highlanders exclaimed suddenly, half rose, and dropped again to his knees. The blood was welling from a wound in his throat, but as his body sagged sideways he caught himself with a visible effort, and his hands, which had never loosed their grip on the rifle, fumbled at the breech a moment, and slipped in a fresh clip of cartridges. He gulped heavily, spat out a great mouthful of frothy blood, spoke thickly and in gasps, “Hey, Mac ... tak’ her, for ... the last. The magazine’s full ...” And he thrust out the rifle to the other Scot with a last effort, lurched sideways, and slid gently down in the bottom of the pit. The other man caught the rifle quickly, placed it by his side, and resumed firing. The others never ceased for a moment to load and fire at top speed. Plainly there was no time to attend to the dead or wounded when they themselves were visibly near the end the other had met.
The German line was coming in under the guard of the shells that the gunners dared not drop closer for fear of hitting their own line. The rifles were too few to hold back the weight of men that were coming in now in a scattered rush.
Pug cursed wrathfully. “I do b’lieve the blighters is goin’ to get in on us,” he said; and by his tone one might suppose he had only just realized the possibility; was divided between astonishment and anger at it. Kentucky, who had looked on the possibility as a certainty for some little time back, continued to pick a man of the advancing line, snap-shoot hurriedly at him, load and pick another target. And away somewhere in the back of his mind his thoughts worked and worried at the old, irritating puzzle--“Lilies, no; but something like them ... heavy, sweetish ... not lilies ... what other flower, now ...”; Jim, the third Stonewall, glanced back over his shoulder. “Why can’t them fellows back there shoot a bit quicker?” he said irritably. “They’ll have this lot a-top o’ us if they don’t look out.” Kentucky, his fingers slipping in a fresh cartridge-clip, his eye singling out a fresh mark, was slightly amused to notice that this man, too, seemed surprised by the possibility of the Germans breaking through their fire; and all the while “... lilac, stocks, honeysuckle, hyacinth ... hyacinth, hyacinth, no ...”; the Scot lifted the dead man’s rifle and put it on the ledge at his right elbow.