Following him cautiously, we came to the bend he had mentioned Twenty yards short, we unhooked and ran the gun up by hand. Had we driven straight on to the position, the heads of the horses would have shown up and we should have been wiped out before we had fired our first round. As it was there was a bunch of scrub, just tall enough to hide us. Peering through the branches, we could see about five hundred yards distant a barricade constructed of timbers and sandbags, from which came vicious sprays of death. Repeated endeavors had to be made to rush it. In front and all around lay our fallen infantry, their rifles with fixed bayonets tossed aside and their fingers dug into the turf. The postures in which they had collapsed were violently grotesque. There was forlornness, but little dignity about their twisted attitudes. Behind the sandbags there was a sense of watching eyes; but only the sense—one saw no movement. The men who kept guard there were brave. They hadn’t a chance in the world. They must have known that their fate was sealed from the first. They were selling their lives dearly that their comrades, fleeing behind them, might gain time. Those comrades would never know how they had died—would never be able to thank them. There would be no Iron Crosses co reward their valour—they would be lucky if they were awarded the decency of a grave. We acknowledged their courage, and we hated them. Our first shot went plus, our second minus, our third scored a direct hit on the barricade. As the sandbags crumbled and the gray uniforms became plain, our infantry leapt from their places of hiding, charging up the gorge with their cold bayonets. We saw hands thrust up in an appeal for mercy, then nothing but khaki, stabbing and cheeking wildly. When we had hooked in and rode by five minutes later, four men in smoke-gray lay watching the sky with unblinking eyes. They were decent looking men, with flaxen hair and high complexions. They were perfectly ordinary individuals, with nothing either noticeably noble or brutal in their appearance. Had we encountered them as waiters in a London or New York restaurant, they would probably have proved entirely in keeping with their situation. By the accident of war they had been called upon to perform a deed quite as desperate as that of the Roman Horatius, who kept the bridge against unnumbered foes. The gorge was one of the keys to the great plain across which the Huns were retiring. These four men, single-handed, with no hope of saving their own lives, had held up our advance for half an hour against repeated infantry and cavalry charges, accounting for fully twenty times their own number in casualties. It was an act of superb sacrifice, which could only have been inspired by the highest sense of duty and patriotism. Had we met them in fable, we should have done them homage; meeting them where we did, we clubbed them like rats escaping from a cage. Even now that they were dead we detested them.