“A gas attack! Several hundred pairs of wide-open warriors’ eyes fixed their glances upon the ugly, smoking cloud that, lazy and impenetrable, rolled toward us. Hundreds of fighting eyes, fixed, threatening, deadly. Let them come, the blacks! And they came. First singly, at wide intervals. Feeling their way, like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish. Eager, grasping, like the claws of a mighty monster. Thus they rushed closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing in their cloud. Entire bodies and single limbs, now showing in the harsh glare, now sinking in the shadows, came nearer and nearer. Strong, wild fellows, their log-like, fat, black skulls wrapped in pieces of dirty rags. Showing their grinning teeth like panthers, with their bellies drawn in and their necks stretched forward. Some with bayonets on their rifles. Many only armed with knives. Monsters all, in their confused hatred. Frightful their distorted, dark grimaces. Horrible their unnaturally wide-opened, burning, bloodshot eyes. Eyes that seem like terrible beings themselves. Like unearthly, hell-born beings. Eyes that seemed to run ahead of their owners, lashed, unchained, no longer to be restrained. On they came like dogs gone mad and cats spitting and yowling, with a burning lust for human blood, with a cruel dissemblance of their beastly malice. Behind them came the first wave of the attackers, in close order, a solid, rolling black wall, rising and falling, swaying and heaving, impenetrable, endless. “‘Close range! Individual firing! Take careful aim!’ My orders rang out sharp and clear and were correctly understood by all the men. They stood as if carved out of stone, their lips tightly pressed, the muscles of their cheeks swollen, and took aim. Just like rifle range work. The first blacks fell headlong in full course in our wire entanglements, turning somersaults like the clowns in a circus. Some of them half rose, remained hanging, jerked themselves further, crawling, gliding, like snakes—cut wires—sprang over—tumbled—fell. [Illustration: © _Underwood and Underwood._ Spahis Winding Their War Bonnets Famed for their fierce charges, these French colonial troops were helpless in the face of prolonged shelling.] “Nearer and nearer rolled the wall. Gaps opened and closed again. Lines halted and rolled on again. Whrr rratt—tenggg—ssstt—crack! Our artillery sent them its greeting! Whole groups melted away. Dismembered bodies, sticky earth, shattered rocks, were mixed in wild disorder. The black cloud halted, wavered, closed its ranks—and rolled nearer and nearer, irresistible, crushing, devastating! And the rifles were flashing all the time. A dissonant, voiceless rattle. The men still stood there and took aim. Calmly, surely, not wasting a single shot. The stamping and snorting of thousands of panting beasts ate up the ground between us.” “HELL SEEMED LET LOOSE”