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His plough was in the furrow where he had left it when he unhitched his team for the day, before an orderly had come to tell him that he must move out of his house overnight. The wheat stubble swept on up to a knoll in the distance. All the landscape in front of Fracasse's company seemed to have been deserted; no moving figures were anywhere in sight; no sign of the enemy's infantry.
A digression, this, about pale, little Peterkin, the valet's son, whom we left nibbling a biscuit in perfect security after his leap in mortal terror. When Fracasse's men rose from their trench for the final charge and found that the enemy had gone, Peterkin, hearing their cheer and the thunderous tread of their feet, dared to look above the edge of the shell crater.
Having watched the result, Dellarme turned with a confirmatory gesture, which the corporal translated into the wigwag of "Correct!" The shrapnel smoke hanging over Fracasse's men appeared a heavenly blue to Dellarme's men. "They are going to start for us soon! Oh, but we'll get a lot of them!" whispered Stransky gleefully to his rifle. Dellarme glanced again toward the colonel's station.
Sweeping on up toward the redoubts, it found that parallels and trenches had been filled to give footing for the swifter impulse of the tide, once it was started for the heights. A flash from Fracasse's pocket lamp showed faces pasty white and eyes of staring glassiness.
There she paused, held by the scene that a score or more of Gray soldiers, who had riotously crowded into the dining-room, were enacting. These men in the dining-room were members of Fracasse's company of the Grays whom Marta had seen from her window the night before rushing across the road into the garden. It is time for their story the story of their attack on the redoubt.
For the like of this, in gathering the enemy's spears to his breast, a saga had risen around one national hero. But Fracasse's veterans were only the shivering units of the millions; the part of the machine that happened to be the first to strike another machine in collision.
Half of the distance from the foot to the crest of the knoll Fracasse's men have gone in face of the hot, sizzling tornado of bullets, when there is a blast of explosions in their faces with all the chaotic and irresistible force of a volcanic eruption.
Hugo Mallin had fired when the others fired; advanced when the others advanced. He had done his mechanical part in a way that had not excited Fracasse's further acute displeasure, and he had no sense of physical fatigue, only of mental depression, of the elemental things that he had seen and felt this day in a whirling pressure on his brain. It seemed to him that all his comrades had changed.
It was not Dellarme's company, but some other that had mistaken its direction and retired too late and by the wrong road. You will throw hand-grenades, will you? thought Fracasse's men. You will mangle our fellows when they Can't strike back, will you? Now you'll pay! Now it is our turn! We have seen our blood flow and now yours will flow!
After the failure to rush the knoll the Gray commander had settled down to the business of a systematic approach. And what of those of Fracasse's men who had not run but had dropped in their tracks when the charge halted? They were between two lines of fire. There was no escape.
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