darkness to
ghastly vivid light, the fierce red and orange of bursting bombs and
grenades threw splashes of angry colour on the glistening wet parapets,
the flat khaki caps of the British, the dark overcoats of the Germans
struggling and hacking in the barb-wires. The eye was confused with
the medley of leaping lights and shadows; the ear was dazed with the
clamour and uproar of cracking rifles, screaming bullets, and
shattering bombs, the oaths and yells, the shouted orders, the groans
and outcries of the wounded. Then from overhead came a savage rush and
shriek, a flash of light that showed vivid even amidst the confusion of
light, a harder, more vicious crash than all the other crashing
reports, and the shrapnel ripped down along the line of the German
trench that erupted struggling, hurrying knots of men.

A call from the trench telephone, or the sound of the burst of bomb and
rifle fire, had brought the gunners on the jump for their loaded
pieces, and once more the guns were taking a hand. Shell after shell
roared up overhead and lashed the ground with shrapnel, and for a
moment the attack flinched and hung back and swayed uncertainly under
the cruel hail. For a moment only, and then it surged on again,
seethed and eddied in agitated whirlpools amongst the stakes and
strands of the torturing wires, came on again, and with a roar of hate
and frenzied triumph leaped at the low parapet. The parapet flamed and
roared again in gusts of rapid fire, and the front ranks of the
attackers withered and went down in struggling heaps before it. But
the ranks behind came on fiercely and poured in over the trench; the
lights flickered and danced on plunging bayonets and polished butts;
the savage voices of the killing machines were drowned in the more
savage clamour of the human fighter, and then . . . comparative silence
fell on the trench.

The attack had succeeded, the Germans were in and, save for one little
knot of men who had escaped at the last minute, the defenders were
killed, wounded, or taken prisoners. The captured trench was shaped
like the curve of a tall, thin capital D, a short communication trench
leading in to either end from the main firing trench that formed the
back of the D and a prolongation outwards from it. The curve was in
German hands, but no sooner was this certain than the main trench
sprang to angry life. The Germans in the captured curve worked in a
desperation of haste, pulling sandbag