Another ten minutes. Still no Gogarty.
“I wonder where he is,” muttered Boone restlessly. “We ought to have a watch on the far end of this ditch. If they come creeping along it, as they ought to do—Gee whizz!”
From behind the German line came a chorus of sharp discharges; then a whirring and a humming over Boone’s head. Then the earth rocked beneath the tremendous detonation, and the skies were lit up with the flash of a barrage of German trench-mortar bombs, exploding along two hundred yards of American wire.
The barrage lasted just one minute. Directly after, three things happened, almost simultaneously. The line of raiders rose to its feet and dashed with a yell through the writhing remnants of the wire. The voice of a machine gun—nay, a pair of machine guns—broke into steady reverberation from the shell-crater, seventy yards to Boone’s right. Lastly, a rocket shot up from the American support-line.
“That’s for our artillery,” said Boone to himself. “They’ll be putting down a heavy barrage on No Man’s Land in a moment—right here. Good-night, nurse!”
He began to run swiftly back along the ditch, crouching low. In this posture he rounded a slight bend, and two steel helmets clashed together. Boone, standing up to massage his ringing head, realized that the faithful Gogarty had returned to duty.
“We got dem guys fixed this time!” announced the scout triumphantly. “Two Vickers guns in de shell-hole, to give ’em hell comin’ and goin’!”
It was true. Major Powers had done marvels in the twenty scant minutes at his disposal. He had decided to send two machine guns over to the shell-hole; for ammunition-belts sometimes jam, and it was essential that a continuous stream of bullets should be maintained along the wire during the fateful moment of attack. He had also warned the Artillery and Brigade Headquarters of impending events. Finally, he had withdrawn his trench garrison from the front line as a precaution against a trench-mortar bombardment, and had aligned them, with bayonets fixed, in the support-trench behind, with orders to dash forward to their original positions the moment the signal was given.
They were hasty preparations, but six weeks’ rehearsal could not have made their success more complete. It was just such an undertaking as suits the American soldier—without cohesion or direct leadership, and depending almost entirely upon quick grasp of the situation and spontaneous team-work. The German attacking party, plunging forward through the broken defences, came right into line with the Vickers guns, with the result that it found itself wading through a river of lead flowing at the rate of five hundred bullets per minute at a distance of eighteen inches from the ground. Many went down at once: the others stumbled on gallantly enough, and reached the American trench just in time to see a wave of yelling American soldiers break into it from the ground behind.