Bunthrop himself, to state the fact baldly, was in an agony of fear. He might have been tempted to bolt, but was restrained by a complete lack of any idea where to bolt to, by a lingering remnant of self-respect, and by a firm conviction that he would be dealt with mercilessly if he openly ran. But when he reached the comparative shelter of the broken trench all these safeguards of his decent behavior vanished. He flung himself into the trench, cowered in its deepest part, made not the slightest attempt to look over the parapet, much less to use his rifle. There is this much of excuse for him, that on the very instant that they reached the cover of the trench a bursting high-explosive had caught the four men next in line to him. The excuse may be insufficient for those who have never witnessed at very close hand the instant and terrible destruction of four companions with whom they have eaten and slept and talked and moved and had their intimate being for many months; but those who have known such happenings will understand. 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. "Get up and sling some of those sandbags back on the parapet, Bunthrop!" he said, "and see if you can't make some decent cover for yourself. You've nothing there that would stop a half-crippled Hun jumping in on top of you." When he came back along the trench five minutes later he found Bunthrop feverishly busy re-piling sandbags and strengthening the parapet, ducking hastily and crouching low when a shell roared past overhead, but hurriedly resuming work the instant it had passed. Then came the fresh German attack, preceded by five minutes' intense artillery fire, concentrated on the half-wrecked trench. 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. He flung down and flattened himself to the trench bottom again, squeezing himself close to the earth, submerged and drowned in a sweeping wave of panic fear. He gave no heed to the orders of his platoon commander, the shouting of his sergeant, the stir that ran along the trench, the flat spitting reports of the rifles that began to crack rapidly in a swiftly increasing volume of fire. A huge fragment of shell came down and struck the trench bottom with a suggestively violent thud a foot from his head. Half sick with