up he staggered to the trench and handed over the message, only conscious of a sudden quiet, for that shrapnel had been the last shell of the barrage. Then he found his mouth full of blood and his limbs weak and tottering. He was not wounded he knew; he supposed it must be shell-shock.
At Headquarters he reported the messages delivered, and got some opium from the doctor; in a dream he got rum, then his own men, and found new vigour in his limbs and ferocity in his mind. “Go down? I’m damned if I will,” he muttered, and walked along the trench. The British barrage was on now, and the troops were all ready to move up.
“Will we get into them, sir?” men asked him as he walked along the top of the trench. “Will we get into the ———s with the bayonet?” They were flushed and excited with anticipation and rum, and MacTaggart wondered whether what was left of the old men would carry these raw boys on, or whether they would run and disgrace the regiment. He knew that they had lost a quarter of their strength in the barrage and mostly from his own Company; and he was too old a soldier to be reassured by this feverish talk about bayonets.
“Oh, we’ll get into them all right,” he said. ‘“We’ll give ’em a good deal for this afternoon, and we’ll pay them all
