ed and dropped and stayed still in a string of huddled heaps
amongst and on which the bullets continued to drum and thud. The open
ground was a full hundred yards across at the widest point where the
main attack was delivering. Fifty yards across, the battalion
assaulting was no longer a line, but a scattered series of groups like
beads on a broken string; sixty yards across and the groups had
dwindled to single men and couples with desperately long intervals
between; seventy yards, and there were no more than odd occasional men,
with one little bunch near the centre that had by some extraordinary
chance escaped the sleet of bullets; at eighty yards a sudden swirl of
lead caught this last group--and the line at last was gone, wiped out,
the open was swept clear of those dogged runners. The open ground was
dotted thick with men, men lying prone and still, men crawling on hands
and knees, men dragging themselves slowly and painfully with trailing,
useless legs, men limping, hobbling, staggering, in a desperate
endeavour to get back to their parapet and escape the bullets and
shrapnel that still stormed down upon them. The British gunners
dropped their ranges again, and a deluge of shells and shrapnel burst
crashing and whistling upon the enemy's front parapet. The rifle fire
slackened and almost died, and the last survivors of the charge had
such chance as was left by the enemy's shells to reach the shelter of
their trench. Groups of stretcher-bearers leaped out over the parapet
and ran to pick up the wounded, and hard on their heels another line of
infantry swarmed out and formed up for another attack. As they went
forward at a run the roar of rifles and machine-guns swelled again, and
the hail of bullets began to sweep across to meet them. Into the
forward trench they had vacated, the stream of another battalion
poured, and had commenced to climb out in their turn before the
advancing line was much more than half-way across. This time the
casualties, although appallingly heavy, were not so hopelessly severe
as in the first charge, probably because a salient of the enemy trench
to a flank had been reached by a battalion farther along, and the
devastating enfilading fire of rifles and machine-guns cut off. This
time the broken remnants of the line reached the barbed wires, gathered
in little knots as the individual men ran up and down along the face of
the entanglements looking for the lanes cut clearest by the sw