Here, there, men with rifles were running to take their posts.

Hoarse orders were shouted, and shrill replies rang back.
Then, all at once, a kind of sputtering series of small explosions began to rip along the edge of the south wall.

And now, machine-guns began to talk, with a dry, hard metallic clatter.

And--though whence these came, Flint could not see--grenades began flying over the wall and bursting in the court.

Though unwounded, men fell everywhere these gas-projectiles exploded--fell, stone dead and stiffening at once--fell, in strange, monstrous, awful attitudes of death.
Steam began billowing up; and crackling electrical discharges leaped along the naked wires of the outer barricades.
The whole Plant shook and rattled with the violent concussions of the aerial-bomb guns, already searching the upper air with shrapnel.
Somewhere, out of the range of vision, another terrible shock made the building tremble to its nethermost foundation; and wild yells and cries, as of a charge, a repulse, a savage and determined rush, echoed through the vast enclosure.