“Our officers set their watches very carefully with those of the
artillery officers before we went forward to the front trenches. We
reached the front at 11 p. m., and not until our arrival there were we
informed of the ‘zero hour’—the time when the attack was to be made.
The hour of 12:10 had been selected. The waiting from eleven o’clock
until that time was simply an agony. Some of our men sat stupid and
inert. Others kept talking constantly about the most inconsequential
matters. One man undertook to tell a funny story. No one listened to
it, and the laugh at the end was emaciated and ghastly. The inaction
was driving us all into a state of funk. I could actually feel my
nerve oozing out at my fingertips, and if we had had to wait fifteen
minutes longer I shouldn’t have been able to climb out of the trench.”
Finally the moment for the attack arrived.
“We sneaked out, single file, making our way from shell-hole to
shell-hole, nearly all the time on all-fours, crawling quickly over
the flat places between the holes. The Germans had not sighted us,
but they were squirting machine-gun bullets all over the place like
a man watering a lawn with a garden-hose, and they were bound to get
some of us. Behind me I heard cries of pain and groans, but this made
little impression on my benumbed intelligence. From the mere fact that
whatever had happened had happened to one of the other sections of ten
and not to my own, it seemed, some way or other, no affair to concern
me. Then a man in front of me doubled up suddenly and rolled into a
shell-hole. That simply made me remember very clearly that I was not
to stop on account of it. It was some one else’s business to pick that
man up. Next, according to the queer psychology of battle, I began to
lose my sensation of fear and nervousness. After I saw a second man
go down, I gave my attention principally to a consideration of the
irregularities of the German parapet ahead of us, picking out the spot
where we were to enter the trench. It seems silly to say it, but I
seemed to get some sort of satisfaction out of the realization that we
had lost the percentage which we might be expected to lose going over.
Now, it seemed, the rest of us were safe until we should reach the next
phase of our undertaking.