Probably in this way and in ransacking Lower Toulgas, not over three minutes were lost, but never were three minutes more costly, for during that time the Canadians swung round their guns, and, when the Russians rallied to renew the attack, they were met by muzzle bursts. Nearly a hundred years before, at Wilma, the iron veterans of the Grand Army had been shaken by that blood chilling _Hourra! Hourra!_ of charging Russians; but now it only made those leather faced men at the guns laugh with the wild, delirious delight that comes only to the born fighting man, then only when the fight is at its height. They swore fine, full chested, Canadian blasphemies that were a glory to hear, crammed shrapnel into their guns, and turned terrible blasts into the incoming masses that exploded among them and shattered them into ghastly dismembered corpses and hurled blood and human flesh wide in the air in sickening, splattering atoms. While all the time the American sergeant and his single squad kept up an incessant fire with his Lewis automatic, and those Canadians who were not hit, and were not needed at the guns, worked the bolts of their rifles with the energy of fiends, so that the crackling of small arms sounded like the bursts of machine gun fire from the emplacements, and deceived the Bolsheviks, who thought it was the fire of machine guns. These Canadians had used the rifle often in the untracked places of the Western World, were well schooled in marksmanship, and now when the target loomed big and at extremely short range, they covered the ground with dead. The mere weight of those approaching great numbers would have shaken and turned ordinary troops, for the onslaught was not stopped until less than fifty yards from the guns; but the Canadians were not ordinary men and they gave not the slightest hope of being turned. They would have stood by with their bayonets to the last, and when the Bolsheviks saw the unyielding determination of these Western savages, to whom fear seemed unborn, and knew that more devastating death storms of shrapnel awaited further advance, their morale broke down, the front wave hesitated, panic spread with telepathic swiftness, and in the control of overpowering fear, the whole force bolted and scampered like rabbits to the covering trees. There they were rounded together by the remaining commissars, and from places of concealment directed a hot fire on the guns. So quickly were they reorganized that fifteen minutes after the assault had been turned back, the Company of Royal Scots, hurrying across an open field to the support, were subjected to such a blighting fire that the ground was strewn with the huddled figures of their dead and wounded.