that he'd be willing to come if he could do
any good. A good little man! Peace to his ashes.

At ten o'clock things busted loose, and the most intense
bombardment ever known in warfare up to that time began. Thousands
of guns, both French and English, in fact every available gun
within a radius of fifteen miles, poured it in. In the Bedlamitish
din and roar it was impossible to hear the next man unless he put
his mouth up close to your ear and yelled.

My ear drums ached, and I thought I should go insane if the racket
didn't stop. I was frightfully nervous and scared, but tried not
to show it. An officer or a non-com must conceal his nervousness,
though he be dying with fright.

The faces of the men were hard-set and pale. Some of them looked
positively green. They smoked fag after fag, lighting the new ones
on the butts.

All through the bombardment Fritz was comparatively quiet. He was
saving all his for the time when we should come over. Probably,
too, he was holed up to a large extent in his concrete dug-outs. I
looked over the top once or twice and wondered if I, too, would be
lying there unburied with the rats and maggots gnawing me into an
unrecognizable mass. There were moments in that hour from ten to
eleven when I was distinctly sorry for myself.

The time, strangely enough, went fast--as it probably does with a
condemned man in his last hour. At zero minus ten the word went
down the line "Ten to go" and we got to the better positions of the
trench and secured our footing on the side of the parapet to make
our climb over when the signal came. Some of the men gave their
bayonets a last fond rub, and I looked to my bolt action to see
that it worked well. I had ten rounds in the magazine, and I didn't
intend to rely too much on the bayonet. At a few seconds of eleven
I looked at my wrist watch and was afflicted again with that empty
feeling in the solar plexus. Then the whistles shrilled; I blew
mine, and over we went.

To a disinterested spectator who was far enough up in the air to be
out of range it must have been a wonderful spectacle to see those
thousands of men go over, wave after wave.

The terrain was level out to the point where the little hill of
High Wood rose covered with the splintered poles of what had once
been a forest. This position and the supports to the left and rear
of it began to fairly belch machine-gun and shell fire. If Fritz
had been quiet before, he gave us all he had now.