“We’re a long ways out in front of the rest o’ the line, ain’t we?” said the Corporal.
“Yes, I know,” said the Sergeant. “I want to send a message back presently. This is the spot to hold, an’ don’t you forget it. Just look down—hullo, here’s our barrage droppin’ again. Well, it blots out the view, but it’ll be blottin’ out any Germs that try to push us; so hit ’er up, the Gunners. But——” He broke off suddenly, and stared out into the writhing haze of smoke in front of them. “Here they come,” he said sharply. “Now, Lees, get to it. Stand by, you bombers. Range three hundred the rest o’ you, an’ fire steady. Pick your marks. We got no rounds to waste. Now, then——”
The rifles began to bang steadily, then at a rapidly increasing rate as the fire failed to stop the advance, and more dim figures after figures came looming up hazily and emerging from the smoke. The machine-gunner held his fire until he could bring his sights on a little group, fired in short bursts with a side-ways twitch that sprayed the bullets out fan-wise as they went. The rifle-fire out to right and left of them, and almost behind them, swelled to a long, rolling beat with the tattoo of machine-guns rapping through it in gusts, the explosions of grenades rising and falling in erratic bursts.
Farther back, the guns were hard at it again, and the shells were screaming and rushing overhead in a ceaseless torrent, the shrapnel to blink a star of flame from the heart of a smoke-cloud springing out in mid-air, the high explosive crashing down in ponderous bellowings, up-flung vivid splashes of fire and spouting torrents of smoke, flying mud and earth clods. There were German shells, too, shrieking over, and adding their share to the indescribable uproar, crashing down along the line, and spraying out in circles of fragments, the smaller bits whistling and whizzing viciously, the larger hurtling and humming like monster bees.
“Them shells of ours is comm’ down a sight too close to us, Sergeant,” yelled the Corporal, glancing up as a shrapnel shell cracked sharply almost overhead and sprayed its bullets, scattering and splashing along the wet ground out in front of them.
“All right—it’s shrap,” the Sergeant yelled back. “Bullets is pitchin’ well forrad.”