The men fought like demons—strange shapes in the fog, with here and there as the flames shot up, the flash of their black faces, set to kill.
Winn's voice rallied and held them above the racket of the spitting rifles, and the incessant coughing of the guns. It was the Staines voice let out on a last voyage. To have gone back against it would have been more dangerous than to go on against the guns.
They seized the trench and held it, there were no prisoners taken in the dark, and after the first light they ceased to hear Winn's voice.
The sun came out and showed them all they had won, and what they had lost.
Winn lay peacefully between the old trench and the new, beyond resentment, beyond confusion, in the direct simplicity of death.
THE END