They were scattered and few--very, very few, he saw; fewer even than he had feared when he gazed down upon them from two thousand feet higher. He had counted the forms of the dead among the holders of the hill; he could not, in that flash of vision, see that the many, many were dead; he could see only that, as he dropped down above them, few of the forms were moving. They were drawing together in little groups with bayonets flashing in the sunshine, drawing together in tens and scores and half hundreds for last desperate defense of the hill against the thousands coming to take it. The puffing jets of German machine-gun fire, enfilading the hill from the right and from the left, shone over the ground in the morning sunshine where German machine gunners had worked their way about to fire in front of their charging troops; Gerry saw no such jets from the hill, though the charging men in gray must be in plain sight and within point-blank range at that instant from the English on the hill. The English were short of ammunition, that meant. CHAPTER XI: THE RESISTANCE But the English were going to fight. This knowledge came to Gerry through the rush and suck of the final yards of his three thousand foot fall; mechanically, automatically his hands were tugging at his controls, his feet braced firm on his rudder bar as he began to bring his machine out of the fall. He had come down at terrific speed with his motor only partly shut off; he had no time, and no need, to watch his speed indicator; he knew well enough when he was on edge of the breaking strain which his wings and wires could stand. He slanted more directly toward the Germans and he was very low above the ground; still half falling, half flying--and at greater speed than ever he could have flown--he hurled himself at them, flattening out at perhaps fifty feet from the earth. He knew--not from anything which he consciously saw nor from any conscious reckoning but by the automatism of realization and the reflex from it which guided and coordinated his mind, nerve, and muscle in these terrific instants of attack--he knew that German machine gunners were firing at him; he knew that German riflemen in the ranks which he was charging were giving him bursts of bullets as fast as they could fire; and his fingers which so tenderly had touched the release levers of his bombs, pulled them positively now; with his other hand, which held to the control stick, he had gathered the lanyard which governed his machine gun; he had adjusted it so that the slightest tug would get the guns going; he gave that tug and the reassuring, familiar _jet-jet_ of his guns firing through his airscrew combined with the burst of his bombs below and behind.