"To the guns!" The crews leaped up, resuscitated. "Point blank! At the devil! With percussion! All guns! Fire!" But quick as he and his men had been, the monster was quicker. At his first movement, with a mighty jerk it had slued itself nose-on to the battery. Ere a hand could clutch a firing lever, a storm of small violently exploding shells burst right in among the guns, a hail of whip-cracking machine-gun bullets smote on men and metal. Von Waldhofer looked towards the monster lurching heavily towards him, keyed to a frenzy of suspense. To his horror he heard--not four--but one detonation. The Thing dipped. He saw the shell burst--_over_! He glanced towards the guns in speechless agony. The last gunner was in the act of falling lifeless across the trail. High-nosed, seeming to smell its enemies rather than see them, like an uncouth blind monster of the rudimentary past, the Thing crept on, its speed as surprising as a reptile's. Viciously, with unallayed suspicions, it spat its missiles at the dead battery. Von Waldhofer stood alone, erect, praying that one might strike him. Suddenly its fire ceased. He heard the loud clatter of its machinery as it approached, saw the rolling bands on which it moved. He felt that it was coming to mark its triumph over his beloved guns, felt its disdain for him their helpless master. An insane hatred for it gushed up in him, swept away his conscious self. He whipped out his pistol, ran like a madman towards it. He fired again and again, desperately seeking the eye, the brain, like a hunter at bay with a crocodile. But eyeless, featureless, the great snout slanted upwards above him, impenetrable steel plates, on which his bullets flattened. Blindly the Thing rolled on, ponderous, invulnerable. It bulked huge above him. He heard a shriek. It was his own. In the bright sunshine of a September morning the strange new monsters crawled over that bare countryside racked with noise and tortured with the leaping, eddying smoke of countless explosions. Behind them crowds of khaki-clad men, hatted with inverted bowls like Samurai, followed cheering and laughing like boys behind a circus-car. They waved newspaper posters, obtained Heaven knows whence, that proclaimed in fat bold type: "Great British Victory!" FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 3: 6.45 German Summer Time, 5.45 English Summer Time, 4.45 Greenwich Time. The Summer Time was used in all the Armies.] [Footnote 4: The well-known 4·2" gun.] [Footnote 5: Known to the British Army as High Wood and Devil's Wood respectively.] [Footnote 6: Telephone and Command Dug-out.] [Footnote 7: 6 a.m. English summer time.] [Footnote 8: German Heavy Artillery is organised in "Bataillons" of four batteries.]