The left half of the battalion came through fairly lightly, for the barrage was mainly across the path of the right half, but that right half was simply shot to pieces. The bursting shells caught the men in clumps, the ragged splinters cut others down one by one in rapid succession. The line pressed on doggedly, stumbling and fumbling through the acrid smoke and fumes, stunned and dazed by the noise, the crashing shock of the detonations, the quick-following splashes of blinding light that flamed amongst them. The line pressed on and came at last--what was left of it--through the wall of fire. Behind it the torn ground was littered thick with huddled khaki forms, with dead lying still and curiously indifferent to the turmoil about them, with wounded crawling and dragging themselves into shell-craters in desperate but vain attempts to escape the shells and shrieking fragments that still deluged down from the sky amongst them. The remains of the line staggered on, the men panting and gasping and straining their eyes eagerly for sight of the parapet ahead that marked their first objective, that would give them cover from the raging shell-fire, that would need nothing more than a few minutes' bomb and bayonet work to make their own. They were just taking vague comfort, such of them as had thought for anything but the trench ahead and the hope of clearing the deadly No Man's Land, at finding themselves through that barraging wall of flame and rending steel, when the yelling rushes of the overhead shells paused a moment, to burst out again with full renewed violence next instant as the enemy guns shortened their range. The barrage had dropped back, the curtain of fire was again rolling down, spouting and splashing and flaming across the path of the shattered battalion. The broken line pushed on and into the barrage again ... and from it this time emerged no more than a scattered handful of dazed and shaken men. But the parapet was close ahead now, and the handful took fresh grip of their rifles and ran at it. Some fifty men perhaps reached it; the rest of a full 500 were left lying on the open behind them, waiting for the stretcher bearers--or the burying parties. The "Gamecock's" pilot managed to bring her back into the lines of our old trenches and pancaked her, dropped her flat and neatly into a thicket of barbed wire that clutched and rent her to ribbons, but held her from turning over.