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"Come and help!" he yelled, grabbing at Bunthrop's arm. Bunthrop mumbled stupidly in reply. "What?" shouted the officer. "Come and help, will you? Never mind if you are hurt," as he noticed a smear of blood on the private's face. "You'll be hurt worse if they get into this trench with the bayonet. Come on and help!"
By this time the full meaning of the officer's words the meaning, too, of remarks between the wounded helpers had soaked into Bunthrop's brain. Their only hope, his only hope of life, lay in stopping the attack before it reached the trench; and the machine-guns were a main factor in the stopping. He lost interest in everything except cramming the cartridges into their place.
Bunthrop's sergeant understood, and because he was a good sergeant and had the instinct for the right handling of men it must have been an instinct, because, up to a year before, he had been ledger clerk in a City office and had handled nothing more alive than columns of figures in a book he issued exactly the order that appealed exactly to Bunthrop's terror and roused him from a shivering embodiment of fear to a live thinking and order-obeying private.
When the officer was hit and rolled backwards and lay groaning and swearing, Bunthrop's chief and agonizing thought was that they he had lost the assistance and protection of the gun. When one of the wounded gunners took the officer's place and reopened fire, Bunthrop's only concern again was to keep pace with the loading.
"Why th' 'ell don't you do it yerself?" demanded one of them, angered by Bunthrop's goading and in some degree, no doubt, by the disagreeable knowledge that they were flinching from a duty.
Private Gerald Bunthrop's battalion had been hurried up to support the broken and breaking line, was thrust into a badly wrecked trench with crumbling sides and broken traverses, with many dead and wounded cumbering the feet of the few defenders, with a reek of high-explosive fumes catching their throats and nostrils.
The inferno of noise, the rush and roar of the approaching shells, the crash and earth-shaking thunder of their explosions, the ear-splitting cracks overhead of high-explosive shrapnel, the drone and whirr and thump of their flying fragments the whole racking, roaring, deafening, sense-destroying tempest of noise was too much for Bunthrop's nerve.
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