possible. Everybody
ready in ten minutes. Ladders will be distributed. Take them with you. The
bomb-throwers will leave the trench first. Put on goggles and respirators.
Fix bayonets and set one foot on the pegs and ladders ... all ready in
seven minutes. Three mines will be exploded. Take and hold the craters....
Five minutes!... When the mines explode that is your signal. Bombers lead.
Give them a leg up and follow.... Three minutes...."

From a communication trench a long file of masked bomb-throwers appeared,
loaded sacks slung under their left arms, bombs clutched in their right
hands; and took stations at every ladder and row of freshly driven pegs.

"One minute!" repeated the officers, selecting their own ladders and
drawing their long knives and automatics.

As I finished adjusting my respirator and goggles a muffled voice at my
elbow began: "Be a sport, Doc! Gimme a chanst! Make it fifty-fifty----"

"_Allez!_" shouted an officer through his respirator.

Against the sky all along the parapet's edge hundreds of bayonets wavered
for a second; then dark figures leaped up, scrambled, crawled forward,
rose, ran out into the sunless, pallid light.

Like surf bursting along a coast a curtain of exploding shells stretched
straight across the debris of what had been a meadow--a long line of livid
obscurity split with flame and storms of driving sand and gravel. Shrapnel
leisurely unfolded its cottony coils overhead and the iron helmets rang
under the hail.

Men fell forward, backward, sideways, remaining motionless, or rolling
about, or rising to limp on again. There was smoke, now, and mire, and the
unbroken rattle of machine guns.

Ahead, men were fishing in their sacks and throwing bombs like a pack of
boys stoning a snake; I caught glimpses of them furiously at work from
where I knelt beside one fallen man after another, desperately busy with
my own business.

Bearers ran out where I was at work, not my own company but some French
ambulance sections who served me as well as their own surgeons where, in a
shell crater partly full of water, we found some shelter for the wounded.

Over us black smoke from the Jack Johnsons rolled as it rolls out of the
stacks of soft-coal burning locomotives; the outrageous din never
slackened, but our deafened ears had become insensible under the repeated
blows of sound, yet not paralyzed. For I remember, squatting there in that
shell crater, hearing a cricket tranquilly tun