At dawn, for one hour, enemy batteries from across the Vaga shelled the foremost position on the elevated ground, then suddenly ceased firing, and like grotesque Jacks in the Box, swarms of white-clad Bolsheviks arose by magic from the concealment of the ravines. A succession of long, white lines came from the close forest, and across the open snow of the Vaga came still more advancing, white-clothed men. Against such bulked masses, resistance was impossible. Three machine guns, burst after burst, tore rending gaps in the coming lines, but they merely welded and kept on. When the last pannier of ammunition was gone, word was given to blaze a path through to the rear--and double time! And now down the steep hillside the trapped company charged, tumbling and fighting like maddened, cornered animals, until they gained a foothold on the road which stretched out bleak and coverless eight hundred yards to the main village. Some tried to make a run of it over the bottomless, intervening snows, where they struggled piteously like hobbled animals and were killed. But in most part, they dashed in frantic relays down the open road, sprinting forward a score of yards, then flattening on the ground, and so on, rushing and sprawling flat, until the fatal course was run, while every rifle from the abandoned village on the height, and the flanking forest and across the Vaga spurted death, and machine guns rattled rasping death, and bullets lashed the air with the furious cracking of ten thousand whips, or sped fluttering through the snow, and went off whimpering into space, or felled men with sledgelike blows, until the doomed way was strewn, end to end, with the prostrate forms of the fallen ones, and a pitiful few, by some fluke of luck, had gained the shielding hill. Not ten minutes had been taken in that terrible dash through that valley of Death's shadow, and of the forty-seven who began the journey, six reached the goal of the main village. In the fearful sub-zero temperature, all of the wounded would have perished by freezing, had not a volunteer party, braving the unspeakable, barbarous Bolos (who for some reason held their fire), gone out in the open snow and brought them to shelter. Fifteen were thus accounted for, and the rest lay somewhere beyond sight, "missing in action," that ambiguous, impersonal expression of the War Department, so fraught with mingled hope and dread, harrowing fear. [Illustration: When the snow mounted high the fortifications had been made safe against any projectile save a six-inch shell]