onet man.

They say a drowning man or a man in great danger reviews his past.
I didn't. I spent those few minutes wondering when the machine-gun
fire would come.

I had the same "gone" feeling in the pit of the stomach that you
have when you drop fast in an elevator. The skin on my face felt
tight, and I remember that I wanted to pucker my nose and pull my
upper lip down over my teeth.

We got clean up to their wire before they spotted us. Their
entanglements had been flattened by our barrage fire, but we had to
get up to pick our way through, and they saw us.

Instantly the "Very" lights began to go up in scores, and hell
broke loose. They must have turned twenty machine guns on us, or at
us, but their aim evidently was high, for they only "clicked" two
out of our immediate party. We had started with ten men, the other
fifty being divided into three more parties farther down the line.

When the machine guns started, we charged. Jerry and I were ahead
as bayonet men, with the rest of the party following with buckets
of "Mills" bombs and "Stokeses."

It was pretty light, there were so many flares going up from both
sides. When I jumped on the parapet, there was a whaling big Boche
looking up at me with his rifle resting on the sandbags. I was
almost on the point of his bayonet.

For an instant I stood with a kind of paralyzed sensation, and
there flashed through my mind the instructions of the manual for
such a situation, only I didn't apply those instructions to this
emergency.

Instead I thought--if such a flash could be called thinking--how I,
as an instructor, would have told a rookie to act, working on a
dummy. I had a sort of detached feeling as though this was a silly
dream.

Probably this hesitation didn't last more than a second.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jerry lunge, and I lunged
too. Why that Boche did not fire I don't know. Perhaps he did and
missed. Anyhow I went down and in on him, and the bayonet went
through his throat.

Jerry had done his man in and all hands piled into the trench.

Then we started to race along the traverses. We found a machine
gun and put an eleven-pound high-explosive "Stokes" under it. Three
or four Germans appeared, running down communication trenches, and
the bombers sent a few Millses after them. Then we came to a
dug-out door--in fact, several, as Fritz, like a woodchuck, always
has more than one entrance to his burrow. We broke these in in jig
t