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Bunthrop found himself half buried in a landslide of crumbling trench, struggled desperately clear, gasping and choking in the black cloud of smoke and fumes, saw presently, as the smoke thinned and dissolved, a chaos of broken earth and sandbags where the machine-guns had stood; saw one man and an officer dragging their gun from the débris, setting it up again on the broken edge of the trench.
Bunthrop scrambled up the broken bank, seized the gun, swung the sights full to the broad gray target, and opened fire. He kept it going steadily, too, with a sleet of bullets whistling and whipping past him, kept on after a bullet snatched the cap from his head, and others in quick succession cut away a shoulder strap, scored a red weal across his neck, stabbed through the point of his shoulder.
They made the approach, too, under a destructive fire with high-explosive shells screaming and crashing over, around, and amongst them, with bullets whistling and hissing about them and striking the ground with the sound of constantly exploding Chinese crackers. Bunthrop himself, to state the fact baldly, was in an agony of fear.
And Private Bunthrop, the despised "conscript," slung his bayoneted rifle over his wounded shoulder and commenced to scramble up out over the front of the broken parapet. And what is more he was really and genuinely annoyed when the sergeant catching him by the heel dragged him down again and ordered him to stay there.
Bunthrop had with his battalion passed along some smashed communication trenches and over the open ground this fighting had covered, and the sights they saw in passing might easily have shaken the stoutest hearts and nerves.
We must stop 'em with the bullet. Hurry up, man; hurry, if you don't want to be skewered like a stuck pig!" He rattled off burst after burst of fire, clamoring at Bunthrop to hurry, hurry, hurry. A wounded machine-gunner joined them, and then some others, and the gun began to spit a steady string of bullets again.
Gerald Bunthrop was not a conscript in the strict sense of the word, because when he enlisted no legal form of conscription existed in the United Kingdom; but he was, as many more have been, a moral conscript, a man utterly averse to any form of soldiering, much less fighting, very reluctantly driven into the Army by force of circumstance and pressure from without himself.
He scrambled hurriedly back down the broken parapet into the trench. "Come on, you fellows," he shouted to two or three nearby men who continued to fire their rifles over the parapet. "It's no use waitin' here any longer." A heavy shell whooped roaring over them and crashed thunderously close behind the parapet. Bunthrop paid no slightest heed to it.
"You, Bunthrop," he shouted, "are you hit? Get up, you fool, and shoot! If we can't stop 'em before they reach here we're done in." Bunthrop hardly heeded him.
Another man staggered up the crumbling earth bank to help, and presently amongst them they got the gun into action again. The officer left it and ran to where he saw the other gun half buried in loose earth. He dragged it clear, found it undamaged, looked round, shouted at Bunthrop crouching flat against the trench wall; shouted again, came down the earth bank to him with a rush.
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