Suddenly the word of command broke hoarsely on their ears. As it came from the Commanding Officer, a bullet struck him in the heart. He fell with a groan that was hardly audible. At the last word of their beloved Commander the Highlanders sprang up, and with an angry yell rushed headlong towards the moat. But narrow though the space they had to cross, the withering fire from the machine guns made it impossible to traverse it. The leading ranks, officers and men alike, were beaten down by lead as hail beats down a field of waving corn. The rest wavered, turned, and in a moment the ill-starred regiment, all that was left of it, rushed down the hill in desperate flight. Attempts to rally them were futile. Neither man nor devil could, or would, stand against that awful overwhelming hail of shot and shell. On the other side of the fort, the Marines had approached somewhat nearer to success. Here the gaps in the wire entanglements seen at close quarters afforded some encouragement. With an inspiring cheer, the men dashed forward, their bayonets fixed; but suddenly, as if from the earth itself, sprang up an opposing line of bayonets. The gaps in the entanglement were filled with German soldiers, and in an instant the combatants were engaged, man to man, in a furious hand-to-hand encounter. Deep groans and screaming blasphemies blended with the tumult of the guns. Here and there in the mêlée, men whose bayonets were broken off clubbed their rifles and savagely battered at each other's faces; but still more ghastly than the injuries thus exchanged was the hellish work effected by the hand grenades, of which the Fort contained large quantities. These explosives, now used for the first time on English soil, blew men literally to pieces. Neither skill nor courage could avert these horrible results. The methods of the anarchist had been allowed to find scope in the warfare of civilized peoples. The bombs, wherever they struck, made mincemeat of humanity. The Marines, like the Highlanders, had been driven back, and there came a ghastly interlude when the Germans sought to rescue their wounded and distinguish and carry in the dead. Those who had been butchered by the hand grenades had to be hastily shovelled into sacks and baskets before their remains could be removed. No pen could dare describe in detail all the revolting sights which this small battle-field in a few brief moments had revealed. Severed heads rolled down the hill, the eyes wide open, the features fixed in horror. In one spot from ten to fifteen corpses, friends and foes together, involved and twisted in a shapeless mass, were suddenly discovered in a hollow. In many instances the force of the explosions had torn the clothing from the bodies of the soldiers. Arms and legs had been wrenched from their trunks and blown away. From pyramidal heaps of mutilated English corpses stiffened fingers pointed towards the sky.