CHAPTER XXXII

Our observers in a captive balloon had made out before sunrise the massing of machine guns in front. They were still coming on in endless procession of swirling auto-transports that lifted clouds of white dust that swept toward our lines in billows so dense at times the field was obscured.

Hood decided to close in on those guns before they could be assembled and mounted.

With a savage yell a brigade of regulars led the charge, followed by ten thousand picked men. Pressing forward before a dust cloud the regulars penetrated within a hundred yards of the enemy’s lines before they were discovered. The rush with which they crossed the space was resistless. The splutter of pompoms filled the air and half the line went down. The remaining half reached the first crews. Hand to hand now and man to man they fought like demons--bayonets, revolvers, clubs, fists and stones! Friend and foe mingled in a mad holocaust of death. While still they fought, the second line of our charging men reached the spot and joined the fray. Twenty machine guns had been captured and turned on their foes. An ominous quiet behind the scene of this bloody combat followed the first roar of the clash.

The commander of the invaders, seeing that he had lost some guns, instantly drew back his lines and reformed them fan-shaped with each gun bearing on the breach.

A tornado of whistling lead suddenly burst on the mass of our victorious troops. Five hundred machine guns had been concentrated with a speed that was stunning.

Our men dropped in platoons. They swayed and rallied and once more faced the foe for a second charge. Machine guns seemed to rise from the earth. They were fighting five regiments of men all armed with them.

The commander of our charging division tried in vain to rally. In thirty minutes there was nothing to rally. They lay in ghastly moaning heaps while whistling bullets sang their requiem in an endless crackle that came like the popping of straw before the roar of flames in a burning meadow. Whole regiments were literally wiped out with every officer and every man left torn and mangled on the field.

The reserves in the trenches saw the hideous butchery in helpless fury. No moving thing could live within the radius of those guns.

When the last man had fallen, the spluttering pompoms died away and a green billow of smoke began to roll toward our lines. It swept on in a steady, even wave three miles long. The wind was carrying the cloud straight across the trenches in which our men crouched to receive the charge they expected to follow our failure.

The dust clouds had been pouring in their faces all morning. They paid no attention to the changing greenish tints of the new dust bank. The deadly fumes poured over our trenches in silence. The men breathed once and dropped in strangling horror, clutching and tearing at their throats. The guns fell by their sides as their bodies writhed and twisted in mortal agony. The pestilence swept the field scorching and curling every living thing.

Behind it in the shadows stalked a new figure in the history of war--ghouls in shining divers’ helmets with knife and revolver to complete the assassin’s work.

A thousand fiends of hell charging in serried ranks with faces silhouetted by the red glare of the pit could not have made a picture more hideous than these crouching diving machines as they scrambled over the shambles of the trenches and ruthlessly shot the few surviving figures, blindly fighting for air.

Behind those monsters who were proof against the poison fumes advanced the dense masses of infantry.

The way was clear, the backbone of the defense had been broken. Three miles of undefended trenches lay in front. It was the simplest work of routine to give the order to charge and watch them pour through the far-flung hopeless breach, swing to the right and left and roll the broken ranks up in two mighty scrolls of blood and death.

It was done with remorseless, savage brutality. Our men asked no quarter. They got none.

The leader of the charging hosts had orders to exterminate the contemptible little army of civilians that had dared oppose the imperial hosts.

They were setting an example of frightfulness that would make the task of complete conquest easy.

“Kill! Kill! Kill!” shouted the stout bow-legged General in command of the cavalry. “It’s mercy in the long run! Let them know that we mean what we say!”

When our men saw their methods and knew that the end was sure, they sold each life for all it would bring in the shambles. Many a stalwart foe bit the dust and lay cold and still or writhing in mortal agony among the heaps of our dead and wounded before the awful day had ended.

The cries of the wounded were heartrending. A weird, unearthly sound came from the vast field of groaning, wailing, dying, gibbering men. The most hideous scenes of all were enacted by maniacs who laughed the red laugh of death in each other’s faces.

The horizon toward Southampton was black now with the smoke of burning villages. They had set them on fire with deliberate wanton purpose of destructive terror.

Would they burn Babylon in the same way? Would these maddened brutes break into our homes and make the night still more hideous with crimes against women and children?

A wave of horror swept Vassar’s soul as he thought of his nieces and the woman he loved. He crept through the shadows of the woods and hurried toward the Holland home.