But when only about twenty paces in front of us, their onward career was suddenly stopped short by some invisible barrier, which made them crowd upon each other like penned cattle, passive targets for the bullets of our repeating rifles that rained upon them thick and fast as hail, knocking them over like so many rabbits in a ride. This barrier, which thus strangely stemmed the rush of their storming tide, was composed of fencing wire of several coils, strongly stretched and impaled, which had been run along all the front of our entrenched lines as an additional measure of defence against the contingency of such an attack, and formed one of the most recent innovations in the field warfare of the Germans—an innovation which had commended itself to the Emperor, who himself put it to a practical and approved test at the autumn manœuvres of last year.
A yell of savage fury rose from the storming columns of the Russians, who had thus been stopped in their career and baulked of their objective in this most bloody and calamitous manner; and though the impact of succeeding waves of assailants soon levelled all the wire fencing with the ground, still the mass momentum of their charge had been diminished, their dogged courage had also been shaken by the busy doings of Death among their huddled ranks during their temporary check; but worst of all, before the Russians could recover the force of their forward rush, the Germans were out of their entrenchments and upon them with the bayonet.
A few moments of grim and ghastly hand-to-hand fighting then ensued—and let it never after this be said that the bayonet has been entirely supplanted by the bullet; but I had only time to observe that Gourko’s brave,—I was almost going to say indomitable,—troops were beginning to waver, to go down, to yield before the forceful push of the Teutonic pike, when suddenly again the electric lights of the Russians were turned off, and the dark curtain of night, in mercy to the vanquished, fell upon the bloody drama.
Pursuit by the Germans in such circumstances was quite impossible, but, recovering their ranks with singular precision, they sent salvo after salvo of artillery and musketry in the direction of the retreating foe, until the ‘Cease firing’ was sounded all along our victorious line as the faint and startled dawn began to blush—as if for very shame at such infernal work; and the bugle-sounds were supplemented by the shrill whistles of the company commanders, reminding me of the days when I loved to listen to the clear piping of the darting water-ousel among the rocky streams of the Grampians, amid scenes unsullied by the bloody hand of war.