business and go home? Why
didn't somebody stop those silly bugles sounding the Advance?

There they went again! It was enough to drive a man mad!

He turned and ran down the slope a short way. For the moment he held a
grip on himself, but it was slackening, and in another half-minute
he would have lost it and run in mere blind horror. But in the first
group he blundered upon were Dave and Teddy, and a score of the King's
Own, with a couple of ladders between them; and better still, they
were listening to Captain Hopkins, who waved an arm and pointed to an
embrasure to the left. Nat, pulling himself up and staring with the
rest, saw that no gun stood in this embrasure, only a gabion. In a
moment he was climbing the slope again; if a man must die, there's
comfort at least in company. He bore a hand in planting the two
ladders; a third was fetched--heaven knew whence or how--and planted
beside them, and up the men swarmed, three abreast, Dave leading on
the right-hand one, at the foot of which Nat hung back and swayed. He
heard Dave's long sigh, the sigh, the sob almost, of desire answered
at last. He watched him as he mounted. The ladders were still too
short, and the leader on each must climb on the second man's shoulders
to get hand-hold on the coping. In that moment he might be clubbed on
the head, defenceless. On the middle ladder a young officer of the
30th mounted by Dave's side. Nat turned his head away, and as he did
so a rush of men, galled by the fire from the bastion to the right,
came on him like a wave, and swept him up the first four rungs.

He was in for it now. Go back he could not, and he followed the tall
Royal ahead, whose heels scraped against his breast buttons, and once
or twice bruised him in the face; followed up, wondering what face of
death would meet him at the top, where men were yelling and jabbering
in three languages--French, English, and that tongue which belongs
equally to men and brutes at close quarters and killing.

Something came sliding down the ladder. The man in front of Nat ducked
his head; Nat ducked too; but the body slid sideways before it reached
them and dropped plumb--the inert lump which had been Dave McInnes.
His shako, spinning straight down the ladder, struck Nat on the
shoulder and leaped off it down into darkness.

He saw other men drop; he saw Teddy Butson parallel with him on the
far ladder, and mounting with him step for step--now earlier, now
later, but level