It seemed as though the hill suddenly became a place of vast importance.  The Colonel arrived upon the scene, with reinforcements of over a hundred men, and they immediately set to work putting the hill into a state of defence.  Then a battery of field guns were drawn up into position on the “safe” side of the hill, and began without delay to shell the enemy.  Their arrival, however, was decidedly a mixed blessing.  So far, the troops had held the hill quite successfully, and had been undisturbed by hostile artillery, for the simple reason that the enemy was unaware of their positions.  Now the artillery had come and “given the whole show away,” and no sooner did the enemy discover that the hill was held, than he began forthwith to bombard them.

It was obviously impossible to continue “digging in.”  The only thing to do was to squeeze one’s self into the ground, and pray.  It seemed as if the titanic thunderbolts, that had hitherto been hurled aimlessly about, were suddenly concentrated on that one spot.  It seemed as if all the gods in Olympus were hurling their rage upon it, determined to obliterate it from the face of the earth.  The most gigantic guns that had ever been used in war were concentrating their fire upon it, and the result was awful.  Nothing they had experienced before was comparable to it.  It seemed as if the ground were being thrashed with whips of a thousand leaden-loaded thongs.  The smell of the lyddite was nauseating, the uproar stupefying.  Dust rose in the air; trees crashed to the ground.

Hell was let loose:  Hell and Death were dashing around, converting that normal sky and that sane earth into a Pandemonium.  The wonder was that a human life was spared.  The Subaltern had a fleeting feeling that every one except himself must be dead.  When the storm seemed for a moment to have abated, he looked around him and was surprised to see that very little damage had been done to the men.  An inexperienced eye would possibly not have detected any casualties at all.  From a Kipling point of view, the scene was an artistic failure.  Not a man was shrieking; not a man “clawing up the ground.”  Here and there men had rolled over on their sides, and were groaning quite softly to themselves.  Here and there a purple patch in the dusty khaki....

The instinct of men, like animals, is to crawl quietly away from their fellows, and die in solitude.

The Colonel, very little perturbed by the bombardment, had sat throughout with his back resting against a tree, writing messages, or glaring at the map.  Once, a large piece of shell casing had buried itself in the ground a few inches from his leg.  The jagged piece was hot and heavy.

“Good Heavens,” he said to himself, “what curious things Chance and Fate are.  If I had stretched my leg out!  Why didn’t I?” He smiled.

At length a few Stretcher Bearers began to arrive, and the worst cases were carried off by them.  Many of the less seriously wounded had to hobble, or even crawl down the hill, as best they could.  It was a pitiable sight.