Then came another fierce rush against the barricaded streets and the rifle fire rose to a full deep-noted roar, punctuated by the crashing reports of the shells and the boom of a gun that began to fire back from somewhere in the town. Down in the street the attack pushed home again to the barricades, and men pulled and dragged at the overturned carts and leaped and scrambled to cross them, and fired in each other’s faces; and, where the barricade was gapped for a moment, thrust and stabbed with the bayonet and smashed with the butt and tore and beat at one another, until slowly the attack gave again and the barricade was made good. In the rooms upstairs where Papa Laval was, the men pumped bullets from the loopholes and the windows down on to the struggling mass that pushed in to the barricade, until a machine-gun was turned on the house and hailed a storm of bullets back and forward, across and across its front. The storm caught several of the men at the windows, and they fell back killed or badly wounded for the most part. A group of the enemy turned from the barricade, ran across and began beating at the door and the barred and shuttered windows. Half a dozen of the garrison, on a command from the officer, jumped from their loopholes and poured clattering down the stairs, just as a rifle thrust into the lock and fired blew it away and the door swung open. As the Germans rushed in they were met by the men plunging headlong down the stair, and in the passage and about the stair-foot commenced a wild and desperate hand-to-hand scrimmage. Somewhere outside a building had caught fire, and in the dim light reflected into the house-passage from the leaping flames the fighters scuffled and raged, scarcely seeing each other, stabbing and striking and singling friend from foe by blind instinct. The passage was a pandemonium of shouts and cries and oaths, of trampling scuffling feet, of clashing steel and thudding blows, with every now and then the thunderous report of the officer’s revolver reverberating in the confined space. The advantage of numbers was largely with the Germans, but the narrowness of doorway and passage made it difficult for this weight of numbers to come at the defenders and beat them down; and the British were not only holding their own but were even driving the invaders slowly backward, when the sound of rapid blows, the riving and crashing of woodwork, the clash and tinkle of breaking glass told that one of the shuttered windows had been forced.