Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/174

 took in many things. His eyes never lost the swelling specks of gray which were becoming German storm troops leaping to the attack; but his eyes took in, too, the file of forms in English brown lying waiting over the crest of the hill.

They were scattered and few—very, very few, he saw; fewer even than he had feared when he gazed down upon them from two thousand feet higher. He had counted the forms of the dead among the holders of the hill; he could not, in that flash of vision, see that the many, many were dead; he could see only that, as he dropped down above them, few of the forms were moving. They were drawing together in little groups with bayonets flashing in the sunshine, drawing together in tens and scores and half hundreds for last desperate defense of the hill against the thousands coming to take it.

The puffing jets of German machine-gun fire, enfilading the hill from the right and from the left, shone over the ground in the morning sunshine where German machine gunners had worked their way about to fire in front of their charging troops; Gerry saw no such jets from the hill, though the charging men in gray must be in plain sight and within point-blank range at that instant from the English on the hill. The English were short of ammunition, that meant.