* * * *

A Taube, like some huge insect with a buzz of whirring wings, flew
overhead, dropping multi-coloured stars from its tail. Then our guns
"opened the ball."

There was something blatant and repulsive about that first burst of
sound. The ferns of the forest shivered, as if awakened from a sunny
dream to face terrible calamities. The trees seemed to shake with a
delicate fear of what was in store for them. The enemy's fire burst upon
them with a startling intensity.

There was no point in holding the advanced edge of the wood under such a
bombardment until the actual appearance of the enemy infantry made it
necessary, so the whole line was retired some fifty yards into the wood.
By this manoeuvre the Colonel lost no advantage, and must have saved
many lives.

Although artillery fire had been a pretty frequent occurrence, this was
the heaviest the men had yet experienced. The noise was ear-splitting;
the explosions filled the quivering air; the ground seemed to shudder
beneath them. Branches fell crashing to the ground; it seemed as if a
god was flogging the tree-tops with a huge scourge. The din was awful,
petrifying, numbing.

And in the middle of all this inferno, with the sight of men with ashen
faces limping, crawling, or being dragged to the rear, with the leaves
on the ground smoking from the hot, jagged shell-casings buried among
them, the Subaltern suddenly discovered that he was not afraid. The
discovery struck him as curious. He argued with himself that he had
every right to feel afraid, that he ought to feel "queer." He said to
himself, "Here you are, as nervous and temperamental a youth as ever
stepped, with a mental laziness that amounts to moral cowardice, in the
deuce of a hole that I don't expect you'll ever get out of. You ought to
be in an awful state. Your cheeks ought to be white, and there they are
looking like two raw beef-steaks. Your tongue ought to cleave to the
roof of your mouth; and it isn't. You ought to feel pains in the pit of
your stomach, and you're not. Devil a bit! You know, you're missing all
the sensations that the writers told you about. You're not playing the
game. Come, buck up, fall down and grovel on the ground!" But he did
not. He did not want to. He felt absolutely normal.

A man sheltering behind the same tree suddenly spun round, and, grasping
his left arm, fell with a thud to the ground. He reeled over, with knees
raised and rounded back,