ossible for armies to be armies instead of mobs and for
battles to be won.

They went on until they came to an invisible line drawn lengthwise
across the broad way of the weed field, and here men began to drop down.
Mainly those stricken slid gently forward to lie on their stomachs. Only
here and there was there a man who spun about to fall face upward. Those
who were wounded, but not overthrown, would generally sit down quite
gently and quite deliberately, with puzzled looks in their eyes. Since
still there was neither sign nor sight of the well-hidden enemy the
thought took root in the minds of the men as yet unscathed that,
advancing too fast, they had been caught in the drop curtain of their
own barrage.

Sergeant Hyman Ginsburg, going along at the head of his squad, got this
notion quite well fixed in his mind. Then, though, he saw smoke jets
issuing from bushes and trees on ahead of him where the ridges of the
slope sharpened up acutely into a sort of natural barrier like a wall;
and likewise for the first time he now heard the tat-tat-tat of machine
guns, sounding like the hammers of pneumatic riveters rapidly operated.
To him it seemed a proper course that his squad should take such cover
as the lay of the land afforded and fire back toward the machine guns.
But since the instructions, so far as he knew them, called for a steady
advance up to within a few rods of the enemy's supposed position and
then a quick rush forward, he gave no such command to his squad.

Suddenly he became aware that off to the right the forward movement of
the battalion was checking up. Then, all in an instant, men on both
sides were falling back. He and his squad were enveloped in a reverse
movement. It seemed too bad that the battalion should be driven in after
suffering these casualties and without having dealt a blow in return for
the punishment it had undergone. But what did it matter if, after all,
they were being sacrificed vainly as the result of a hideous mistake at
divisional headquarters? Better to save what was left.

So far as he could tell, nobody gave the word to retire. He found
himself going back at the tail of his squad where before he had been its
head. Subconsciously he was surprised to observe that the copse from
which they had emerged but a minute or two earlier, as he had imagined,
was a considerable distance away from them, now that they had set their
faces toward it. It did not seem possible that they could ha