They went, each still behaving according to his own mode. The man with the gripes who retched was still retching as he heaved himself up over the parapet; the man who had laughed was still laughing; the man who had sworn was mechanically continuing to repeat that naughty pet name of his for the Fritzies. Nobody, though, called on anybody else to defend the glory of the flag; nobody invited anybody to remember the _Lusitania_; nobody spoke a single one of the fine speeches which the bushelmen of fiction at home were even then thinking up to put into the mouths of men moving into battle. Indeed, not in any visible regard was the scene marked by drama. Merely some muddied men burdened with ironmongery and bumpy with gas masks and ammunition packs climbed laboriously out of a slit in the wet earth and in squads--single filing, one man behind the next as directly as might be--stepped along through a pale, sad, slightly misty light at rather a deliberate pace, to traverse a barb-wired meadowland which rose before them at a gentle incline. There was no firing of guns, no waving of swords. There were no swords to wave. There was no enemy in sight and no evidence as yet that they had been sighted by any enemy. As a matter of fact, none of them--neither those who fell nor those who lived--saw on that day a single living individual recognisable as a German. A sense of enormous isolation encompassed them. They seemed to be all alone in a corner of the world that was peopled by diabolical sounds, but not by humans. They had a feeling that because of an error in the plans they had been sent forward without supports; that they--a puny handful--were to be sacrificed under the haunches of the Hindenburg line while all those thousands of others who should have been their companions upon this adventure bided safely behind, held back by the countermand which through some hideous blunder had failed to reach them in time. But they went on. Orders were to go on--and order, plus discipline, plus the individual's sense of responsibility, plus that fear of his that his mates may know how fearful of other things he is--make it possible for armies to be armies instead of mobs and for battles to be won. They went on until they came to an invisible line drawn lengthwise across the broad way of the weed field, and here men began to drop down. Mainly those stricken slid gently forward to lie on their stomachs. Only here and there was there a man who spun about to fall face upward. Those who were wounded, but not overthrown, would generally sit down quite gently and quite deliberately, with puzzled looks in their eyes. Since still there was neither sign nor sight of the well-hidden enemy the thought took root in the minds of the men as yet unscathed that, advancing too fast, they had been caught in the drop curtain of their own barrage.