the truth was that eventually he thought to detach the bayonet , stumbling back to the british lines as machine-gun fire rippled the swollen air and men plodding in the opposite direction marvelled at his luck , hoping for some of the same in the seconds in took for them to pass from this world , last thoughts spinning from heads opened by shrapnel , vital fluids turning the field into what later generations would come to envisage as a particularly vile masalla sauce .