He flung
himself into the trench, cowered in its deepest part, made not the
slightest attempt to look over the parapet, much less to use his rifle.
There is this much of excuse for him, that on the very instant that
they reached the cover of the trench a bursting high-explosive had
caught the four men next in line to him. The excuse may be insufficient
for those who have never witnessed at very close hand the instant and
terrible destruction of four companions with whom they have eaten and
slept and talked and moved and had their intimate being for many
months; but those who have known such happenings will understand.
Bunthrop's sergeant understood, and because he was a good sergeant and
had the instinct for the right handling of men--it must have been an
instinct, because, up to a year before, he had been ledger clerk in a
City office and had handled nothing more alive than columns of figures
in a book--he issued exactly the order that appealed exactly to
Bunthrop's terror and roused him from a shivering embodiment of fear to
a live thinking and order-obeying private. "Get up and sling some of
those sandbags back on the parapet, Bunthrop!" he said, "and see if you
can't make some decent cover for yourself. You've nothing there that
would stop a half-crippled Hun jumping in on top of you.
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