"And we sit here while they go in!" Lanstron added. "There's a kind of injustice about that which I can't get over. Not one of us here has been under fire!"
Even the minute of the attack they knew; and just before midnight they were standing at the window looking out into the night, while the vice-chief held his watch in hand. In the hush the faint sound of a dirigible's propeller high up in the heavens, muffled by the fog, was drowned by the Gray guns opening fire.
Before the mine exploded, by the light of the shell bursts breaking their vast prisms from central spheres of flame for miles, with the quick sequence of a moving-picture flicker, Fracasse's men could see one another's faces, spectral and stiff and pasty white, with teeth gleaming where jaws had dropped, some eyes half closed by the blinding flashes and some opened wide as if the lids were paralyzed. Faces and faces! A sea of faces stretching away down the slope—faces in a trance.
Up over the breastworks, over rocks and splintered timbers, Peterkin and the judge's son and their comrades clambered. When they moved they were as a myriad-legged creature, brain numbed, without any sensation except that of rapids going over a fall. Those in front could not falter, being pushed on by the pressure of those in the rear. For a few steps they were under no fire. The scream of their own shells breaking in infernal pandemonium in front seemed to be a power as irresistible as the rear of the wedge in driving them on.
Then sounds more hideous than the flight of projectiles broke about them with the abruptness of lightnings held in the hollow of the Almighty's hand and suddenly released. The Browns' guns had opened fire. Explosions were even swifter in sequence than the flashes that revealed the stark faces. Dust and stones and flying fragments of flesh filled the air. Men went down in positive paralysis of faculties by the terrific crashes. Sections of the ram were blown to pieces by the burst of a shrapnel shoulder high; other sections were lifted heavenward by a shell burst in the earth.
Peterkin fell with a piece of jagged steel embedded in his brain. He had gone from the quick to the dead so swiftly that he never knew that his charm had failed. The same explosion got Fracasse, sword in hand, and another buried him where he lay. The banker's son went a little farther; the barber's son still farther. Men who were alive hardly realized life, so mixed were life and death. Infernal imagination goes faint; its wildest similes grow feeble and banal before such a consummation of hell.
But the tide keeps on; the torn gaps of the ram are filled by the rushing legs from the rear. Officers urge and lead. Such are the orders; such is the duty prescribed; such is human bravery even in these days when life is sweeter to more men in the joys of mind and body than ever before. Precision, organization, solidarity in this charge such as the days of the "death-or-glory" boys never knew! Over the bodies of Peterkin and the barber's and the banker's sons, plunging through shell craters, stumbling, staggering, cut by swaths and torn by eddies of red destruction in their ranks, the tide proceeded, until its hosts were oftener treading on flesh than on soil. And all they knew was to keep on—keep on, bayonet in hand, till they reached the redoubt, and there they were to stay, alive or dead.
In that pulsating, fierce light, while the ground under their feet trembled with the concussions, Westerling's face was as clear to Marta as if he were staring in at a furnace door. The lines of breeding and of restrained authority which gave it distinction had faded. It had the eager ferocity of the hunt. His short, tense exclamations explained the stages of progress of the attack as revealed to his sight.
"It cannot fail! No! Impossible! Look at the speed of our gun-fire! But I judge that we have not been able to silence as many of their guns as we ought to—they're using shell into our close order. But all the guns in creation shall not stop us! I have men enough this time—enough, enough, enough! There! Our shorter-range guns have ceased firing! That shows we are in the redoubts. The longer-range guns continue. They are firing beyond the redoubt against any counter-attack, if the Browns try to recover what they have lost. But every minute brings another battalion into place. Engineers and guns will follow. The war is as good as won!"