At the same moment a little spark of trailing fire went rushing skywards from the tumult of the flank attack. It was watched with suspended breath--green or red? The rocket burst into an effulgence of uncanny green light. The cheer which came from under it was like a ghostly utterance of the cheer repressed on the lips of the men lying prone and motionless on the glacier. The colonel's forecast was sound. But now the uproar on the flank increased to a wild intensity. Incessant were the sharp detonations of the rifles, the dull thuds of the bombs, mingling with a clamour of voices, shrieks and yells. No more flares went up from the point of conflict, but from all along the trench they soared into the air, symptomatic of the nervousness of the unseen defenders. Machine-guns began to rap out their streams of bullets in blind hazard across the glacier. The staff-captain pressed himself close to the snow, overhead cracked the rapid bullets of the Austrian machine-guns. The wind that blew over the glacier, ruffling the loose surface snow on to his face, was intensely cold. He felt himself a heavy leaden thing, frozen stiff. Over to his right front the savage noises of the contest, weird and awe-inspiring on this summit of the world that seemed so uncannily near to the flashing stars, swelled hideously cacophonous. Livid bursts of flame flickered and were reflected redly on snow surfaces, on black jagged spires of rock. All along the trench the blindingly white flares leaped upward, another soaring as its predecessor circled down in a parabola that illumined the unearthly confusion of the glacier surface. He seemed a mortal for ever severed from his fellow-men, set down in a world that was primitive Arctic chaos, a paralysed spectator of a contest of fierce mountain spirits fighting over spectral issues, remote from the interests of humanity. A part of his mind harked back to the warm summer, the green fields, the somnolent little town of the valley he had left that morning, and it seemed that those things belonged to another existence. Yet all the time he gazed fixedly to the point whence the next rocket should shoot up. He awaited it as he would await the breaking of a spell. At last! The trailing spark of fire shot upwards, burst into hanging globes of red light, the snow rosy beneath them. On the instant the company was erect, rushing forward. Leaping, soaring flares from the trench revealed them--white moving figures casting black shadows on the white glacier. Spurts of livid flame, loud quick detonations darted from the white ridge in front. "_Avanti! Avanti! Italia! Italia!_" shouted the commander. "_Italia! Italia! Savoia!_" came the fierce antistrophe from the rushing men flinging aside their alpenstocks, brandishing their bayoneted rifles.