The supports tried to make some sort of stand, but they failed, were borne back, bustled, lost direction, tried to charge again, broke and gave, scattering and running, were caught in a ferocious flank fire, reeled and swung wide from it, and found themselves penned and jammed back against a broad, deep, and high belt of their own barbed wire. Some of them, by quick work and running the gauntlet of that deadly flanking fire, won clear and escaped round the end of the belt. The rest—and there were anything over two thousand of them—were trapped. The Australian line closed in, pouring a storm of rifle fire on them. Some tried to tear a way through, or over, or under the impenetrable thicket of their own wire; others ran wildly up and down looking for an opening, for any escape from those pelting bullets; others again held their hands high and ran towards the crackling rifles shrieking “Kamerad” surrenders that were drowned in the drumming roll of rifle fire; and some few threw themselves down and tried to take cover and fire back into the teeth of the storm that beat upon them. But the Australian line closed in grimly and inexorably, the men shooting and moving forward a pace or two, standing and shooting—shooting—shooting. ... Teddy Silsey shot away every round he carried, ceased firing only long enough to snatch up a fresh supply from a dead man’s belt, stood again and shot steadily and with savage intensity into the thinning crowd that struggled and tore at the tangled mass of wire. And all the time he cursed bitterly and abominably, reviling and pouring oaths of vengeance on the brutes, the utter savages who had murdered his mates in cold blood. To every man who came near him he had only one message—“Kill them out. They killed their prisoners. I saw them do it. Kill the —— ——!” with a shot after each sentence. And there was a killing. There were other results—the lost ground recaptured and made good; the taken guns retaken, five of them damaged and others with the unexploded destroying charges set and ready for firing; some slight gains made at certain points. But the Australians there will always remember that fight for the big killing, for those murderer Huns pinned against their own wire, for the burning hot barrels of the rifles, for the scattered groups of their own dead—their murdered-prisoner dead—and for the two thousand-odd German bodies counted where they fell or hung limp in the tangles of their barbed wire. And next day Teddy Silsey volunteered for the Bombing Company, the Suicide Club, as they call themselves. He wanted close-up work, he explained. With a rifle you could never be sure you got your own man. With a bomb you could see him——and he detailed what he wanted to see. He appeared to have completely forgotten his “horror of blood.” VII AN AIR BARRAGE