the line, and intent solely on their own
little circle of slaughter.

But this time the German success was hardly made before it was blotted
out. The British supports had been pushed up to the disputed point,
and as the remnants of the last defenders straggled back they met the
fierce rush of the new and fresh force.

This time it was quicker work. The trench by now was shattered and
wrecked out of all real semblance to a defensive work. The edge of the
new attack swirled up to it, lipped over and fell bodily into it. For
a bare minute the defence fought, but it was overborne and wiped out in
that time. The British flung in on top of the defenders like terriers
into a rat-pit, and the fighters snarled and worried and scuffled and
clutched and tore at each other more like savage brutes than men. The
defence was not broken or driven out--it was killed out; and lunging
bayonet or smashing butt caught and finished the few that tried to
struggle and claw a way out up the slippery trench-sides. Hard on the
heels of the victorious attackers came a swarm of men running and
staggering to the trench with filled sandbags over their shoulders. As
the front of the attack passed on over the wrecked trench and pressed
the Germans back across the open, the sandbags were flung down and
heaped scientifically in the criss-cross of a fresh breastwork. Other
men, laden with coils of wire and stakes and hammers, ran out in front
and fell to work erecting a fresh entanglement. In five minutes or
ten--for minutes are hard to count and tally at such a time and in such
work--the new defence was complete, and the fighters in the open ran
back and leapt over into cover.

Once more a steady crackle of rifle-fire ran quivering up and down the
line, and from their own trenches the Germans could see, in the light
of the flares, a new breastwork facing them, a new entanglement waiting
to trap them, a steady stream of fire spitting and sparkling along the
line. They could see, too, the heaped dead between the lines, and in
their own thinned ranks make some reckoning of the cost of their
attempt.

The attempt was over. There were a few score dead lying in ones and
twos and little clumped heaps in the black mud; the disputed trench was
a reeking shambles of dead and wounded; the turn of the
stretcher-bearers and the Red Cross workers had come. There would be
another column to add to the Casualty Lists presently, and another
bundle of tel