so regular in form.

The next night we moved in. As the battalion was crossing the long
open stretch we came under fire from an enemy machine gun and some men
were hit. There's no use talking, no other weapon used in the war is
as deadly as a machine gun. Where you can walk through an artillery
barrage with a few casualties, the well-directed fire of only one
machine gun will pile men up as fast as they come along. When one of
them catches you in the open the only thing to do is to drop into the
nearest hole and stay there until the firing ceases.

We went in on the night of the twelfth and the attack was scheduled
for the night of the thirteenth, or rather the morning of the
fourteenth, as the preliminary bombardment was to commence at
twelve-forty-five and "zero" was one-thirty A.M.

This was the greatest place I have ever seen for rifle grenades and
"Minnies." They came over in flocks or shoals and one must be
everlastingly on the lookout to dodge them. But we had as many as they
and also a lot of Stokes guns which seemed to "put the fear of God"
into the boche. They sprung a new "Minnie" here, much larger than any
we had seen. It hurled a whale of a shell; not less than one hundred
and sixty pounds of pure T. N. T., and what it did to our trenches and
dug-outs was a sin. And the worst of it was, they had it in a hole in
a deep railroad cutting at the bottom of Hill 60, where our artillery
could not reach it.

At this time we had both the regular machine guns and also a lot of
Lewis automatic rifles. Shortly after, the latter were turned over to
the infantry companies, while the former were taken into the
newly-organized machine gun corps, an entirely separate branch of the
service, which was under the direct command of the Brigade Commander.
The guns were distributed along the line in favorable locations for
either defense or offense but, as there were no prepared emplacements,
the men had but little protection.

Here our work, as at St. Eloi, was to support the advance; in fact,
that is the normal function of machine guns in an attack, although the
lighter automatic rifles of the Lewis type are usually with the
assaulting troops.

Our "Higher Command" had learned a lesson from the St. Eloi experience
and had brought up many new batteries, including a fair sprinkling of
the "super-heavies" of twelve and fifteen-inch calibers. It has been
said, on good authority, that we had more than one thousand guns
conce