“It was at this moment, just as we were debouching on to the scragged
front line of trench, that we beheld a scene which stirred and
thrilled us to the bottommost depths of our souls. The great charge of
the Irish division had begun, and we had come up in the nick of time.
Mere words must fail to convey anything like a true picture of the
scene, but it is burned into the memory of all those who were there
and saw it. Let me employ the simile of Parliament Hill. You are more
than half way up it now. The flat top, where the village lies a heap
of ruins, surrounded by a fence of shattered trees, is about 400 yards
away. Between the outer fringe of Ginchy and the front line of our own
trenches is No Man’s Land—a wilderness of pits, so close together that
you could ride astraddle the partitions between any two of them. As
you look half-right, obliquely along No Man’s Land, you behold a great
host of yellow-coated men rise out of the earth and surge forward and
upward in a torrent—not in extended order, as you might expect, but in
one mass—I almost said a compact mass. The only way I can describe the
scene is to ask you to picture five or six columns of men marching up
hill in fours, with about a hundred yards between each column. Now,
conceive those columns being gradually disorganized, some men going
off to the right and others to the left to avoid shell holes. There
seems to be no end to them. Just when you think the flood is subsiding,
another wave comes surging up the beach toward Ginchy.
[Illustration:
_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._