I can picture them now lying upon that bank of dirt, some two feet high and eighteen inches wide--the fire step, they call it--which runs along the front side of the trench, six feet in the ground and three or four feet wide, with nothing overhead, or nothing but branches of trees covered with dust and mud. As I write I can see the entire spectacle: How those men stuck out their rifles through the openings left for them and, at the given signal, fired, never knowing whether they hit and killed their objects. But those bullets went home, all right. The list of wounded on either side, at the end of the week or the end of the month, told more tragically than any individual report could tell that those bullets went home. And day after day, and week after week, every three minutes, or every four minutes, those men raised their smoking, reeking tubes of death, and let fly the fatal messengers. And night after night they had to lie upon that bench bed of dirt and indulge in disturbed sleep, or else gaze out upon that knotted, gnarled mass of barbed-wire entanglements in front of the trenches, as it glistened in the moonlight; that barrier, which, unlike the barbed wire that civilized man--and civilized beast--is accustomed to, has barbs upon it, not one but four inches in length, to rend and tear and catch the flesh of man, and hold him wriggling, writhing and squirming as he tries to charge the enemy, just long enough to give that enemy the chance, from his hiding place over yonder under the ground, to shoot him full of bullet holes. God, what a nightmare it is! And when an assault was ordered and they charged down the alleyways between the sections of barbed-wire entanglement, they found themselves confronted by storms of bullets from those wicked machine guns, each one of which speaks at a rate of 450 to 3,000 times per minute. In order to have even a gambler's chance of capturing the enemy's trench, therefore, sometimes it became necessary to abandon the open alleyways and charge right across and "over the top" of those awful masses of barbed wire. This was almost certain death for those of the first ranks. Other lines of men following close upon the first might also be mowed down as well, as they were caught upon the wire, but after a while all the wire is covered up, and all the space is filled between the top of it, waist high, and the earth, with soldiers' bodies, a veritable foundation of human flesh, upon which the following waves of men usually rushed over successfully without becoming entangled. If fortune was with them, they had some possibility of taking the trench of the enemy. If they did, what next?