ntrated on about a thousand yards of trench, or a gun to every
yard, and I am perfectly willing to believe it after hearing them all
at work. It was our first experience of that delightful situation
where we had "superiority of fire" and it made everybody happy.
Afterward, on the Somme and Ancre, it had become a permanent
condition; but to us, who had been "carrying on" under the
overwhelming odds of the German guns, it was a welcome change. It did
our hearts good to hear those monster thirteen hundred and fifty pound
"babies" coming over our heads with a "woosh" and landing in the lines
across the way, on Hill 60, where they left marks like mine craters.
We could put up with quite a lot just to see that, and although we
were suffering considerably from the rifle grenades and the "Minnies,"
every one appeared to be in a good humor.

With everything ready we waited for the "zero" hour. Exactly at the
designated time the artillery opened. It was as though all the hounds
of hell were let loose. Such a wailing and screeching and hissing as
filled the air, from the eighteen-pounders ("whizz-bangs"), which
seemed to just shave our own parapet, to the gigantic missiles from
the "How-guns," as the Howitzers are affectionately called, each with
its own peculiar noise. The explosions became merged into a continual
roaring crash, without pause or break. Then our Stokes guns joined in,
and, if there ever was an infernal machine, that is it. Vomiting out
shells as fast as they can be fed into its hungry maw; so fast,
indeed, that it is possible for seven of them to be in the air at one
time, from one gun, at a range of less than four hundred yards, it is
the last word in rapid-fire artillery.

Of course the Emma Gees started at the head of the procession and kept
up a continuous fire.

Fritz soon began to do the best he could but, what with the noise of
our own guns and the bursting shells, we were unable to hear his
unless they struck very close. He did give us trouble, though, with
that devilish Minenwerfer which sent over a wheel-barrow load of high
explosive at each shot. He blew the left end of our line "off the map"
for a distance of a hundred yards or more and made it untenable--for
any one but a machine gunner. The infantry was ordered to evacuate
that part and did so, but not the Emma Gees; they stuck until one of
the big "terrors," striking alongside, killed and wounded all the crew
but one and then he still stuck it, l