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.”  When he came back along the trench five minutes later he found Bunthrop feverishly busy re-piling sandbags and strengthening the parapet, ducking hastily and crouching low when a shell roared past overhead, but hurriedly resuming work the instant it had passed.  Then came the fresh German attack, preceded by five minutes’ intense artillery fire, concentrated on the half-wrecked trench.  The inferno of noise, the rush and roar of the approaching shells, the crash and earth-shaking thunder of their explosions, the ear-splitting cracks overhead of high-explosive shrapnel, the drone and whirr and thump of their flying fragments—­the whole racking, roaring, deafening, sense-destroying tempest of noise was too much for Bunthrop’s nerve.  He flung down and flattened himself to the trench bottom again, squeezing himself close to the earth, submerged and drowned in a sweeping wave of panic fear.  He gave no heed to the orders of his platoon commander, the shouting of his sergeant, the stir that ran along the trench, the flat spitting reports of the rifles that began to crack rapidly in a swiftly increasing volume of fire.  A huge fragment of shell came down and struck the trench bottom with a suggestively violent thud a foot from his head.  Half sick with the instant thought, “If it had been a foot this way!...” half crazed with the sense of openness to such a missile, Bunthrop rose to his knees, pressing close to the forward parapet, and looking wildly about him.  His sergeant saw him.  “You, Bunthrop,” he shouted, “are you hit?  Get up, you fool, and shoot!  If we can’t stop ’em before they reach here we’re done in.”  Bunthrop hardly heeded him.  Along the trench the men were shooting at top speed over the parapet; a dozen paces away two of the battalion machine-guns were clattering and racketing in rapid gusts of fire; a little farther along a third one had jambed and was being jerked and hammered at by a couple of sweating men and a wildly cursing boy officer.  So much Bunthrop saw, and then with a hideous screeching roar a high explosive fell and burst in a shattering crash, a spouting hurricane of noise and smoke and flung earth and fragments.