Several minutes passed without any apparent incident; if straining ears caught any sounds they were difficult to distinguish until a stone was displaced on the down hill side of the rock basin. This was hardly a signal, but if an accident it probably precipitated the ensuing action.
There was a sharp, shrill whistle; the yells as of a thousand imps of Satan suddenly filled the night with a fury of sound. With a rush the enemy’s suspected night attack began. Quick orders in German, the leaping forward of heavy feet upon and over the rock parapet, the surging on of men eager to kill marked the arrival of the entire platoon into the Americans’ stronghold. And then a transformation, almost as sudden as the charge, took place.
The yells died down, ceased. Exclamations followed, guttural expressions of evident surprise, announcement, chagrin, at finding the enemy gone. The natural question was: had the Americans quitted their refuge? And the answer was self-evident. Lights were thrown here and there about the rocky floor, into the stone shelters, out among the spruces. Under officers and men gathered in the very center, in hasty conference; twenty, or more, were thus beneath the dim light from a torch stuck in a limb of a spruce tree. Other torches in the hands of the Huns within or on the rocky sides of the basin suffused the place in a pale fight. Only a few men remained without the stronghold. And then, more suddenly than the coming of the platoon, the action, like a well rehearsed drama, took on a vastly changed aspect.
“Fire now!” yelled the shrill voice of Judson, from among the dense herbage ten yards up the hill; the burst of flame and the roar from eleven rifles almost drowned the last word. Nearly as many Huns went down; the second and third irregular volleys followed before the invaders could more than lift a gun and about as many more men dropped. More shooting, fast and furious, sent still others to the earth, a few wounded, most of them done for. Of the reinforced platoon not a dozen men got safely out of the place and disappeared in the darkness. There had not been a single shot fired in answer to the American fusillade.
What followed with the squad was partly mild elation; partly an immediate performance of duty. A detail went about to get the wounded into the shelters, giving them also first aid wherever possible. Another bunch became the undertakers.