It was like an attempt to keep back a tide with a teaspoon.
Their guns did what they could, they did more than it seemed possible guns could do. The men in control of them worked like maniacs.
It was not a time to think of what people could do. The men were falling like leaves off a tree.
The skylarks and the swallows vanished before the villainous occupation of the air. The infantry in the loosely built trenches held on, breathless, broken, like a battered boat in a hurricane, stout against the oncoming waves.
The stars came out and night fell — night rent and tortured, darkness assaulted and broken by a myriad new lights of death, but still merciful, reassuring darkness. The moment for the retreat had come.
It was a never-ending business, a stumbling, bewildering business. The guns roared on, holding open indefatigably, without cessation, the way of their escape.
Much later they got away themselves, dashing blindly in the wake of their exhausted little army, ready to turn at command and hold again, and escape again, and once more hold the unending blue lines, with their unnumbered guns, unwinding like an endless serpent in their rear.
The morning showed them still retreating. Sometimes they were miles ahead and could see nothing but the strangely different barred and shivering villages, small settlements of terror, in an untroubled land.
There were no flowers flung upon them now, only hurried gasping questions, “Are they coming?” “How far are they behind you?”
Sometimes they were halted for half an hour at a time, and sat in hedges and ate, or meant to eat, and slept between the bites.