Our battalion went over from the second trench, and we got the
cream of it.

The tanks were just ahead of us and lumbered along in an imposing
row. They lurched down into deep craters and out again, tipped and
reeled and listed, and sometimes seemed as though they must upset;
but they came up each time and went on and on. And how slow they
did seem to move! Lord, I thought we should never cover that five
or six hundred yards.

The tank machine guns were spitting fire over the heads of our
first wave, and their Hotchkiss guns were rattling. A beautiful
creeping barrage preceded us. Row after row of shells burst at just
the right distance ahead, spewing gobs of smoke and flashes of
flame, made thin by the bright sunlight. Half a dozen airplanes
circled like dragonflies up there in the blue.

There was a tank just ahead of me. I got behind it. And marched
there. Slow! God, how slow! Anyhow, it kept off the machine-gun
bullets, but not, the shrapnel. It was breaking over us in clouds.
I felt the stunning patter of the fragments on my tin hat, cringed
under it, and wondered vaguely why it didn't do me in.

Men in the front wave were going down like tenpins. Off there
diagonally to the right and forward I glimpsed a blinding burst,
and as much as a whole platoon went down.

Around me men were dropping all the time--men I knew. I saw Dolbsie
clawing at his throat as he reeled forward, falling. I saw Vickers
double up, drop his rifle, and somersault, hanging on to his
abdomen.

A hundred yards away, to the right, an officer walked backwards
with an automatic pistol balanced on his finger, smiling, pulling
his men along like a drum major. A shell or something hit him. He
disappeared in a welter of blood and half a dozen of the front file
fell with him.

I thought we must be nearly there and sneaked a look around the
edge of the tank. A traversing machine gun raked the mud, throwing
up handfuls, and I heard the gruff "row, row" of flattened bullets
as they ricocheted off the steel armor. I ducked back, and on we
went.

Slow! Slow! I found myself planning what I would do when I got to
the front trenches--if we ever did. There would be a grand rumpus,
and I would click a dozen or more.

And then we arrived.

I don't suppose that trip across No Man's Land behind the tanks
took over five minutes, but it seemed like an hour.

At the end of it my participation in the battle of High Wood ended.
No, I wasn't wounded. B