When heavy machine-gun fire held up his advance, Capt. Fallow led
his men in an attack on the woods in which the enemy was situated,
captured many prisoners, cleared the woods, and inflicted severe
losses.]
“I heard directions given and I gave some myself. My voice was firm,
and I felt almost calm. Our artillery had so torn up the German barbed
wire that it gave us no trouble at all. We walked through it with only
a few scratches. When we reached the low, sandbag parapet of the enemy
trench we tossed in a few bombs and followed them right over as soon
as they had exploded. There wasn’t a German in sight. They were all in
their dugouts. But we knew pretty well where every dugout was located,
and we rushed for the entrances with our bombs. Everything seemed to
be going just as we had expected it to go. Two Germans ran plump into
me as I rounded a ditch angle, with a bomb in my hand. They had their
hands up and each of them yelled:
“‘Mercy, _Kamerad_!’
“I passed them back to be sent to the rear, and the man who received
them from me chuckled and told them to step lively. The German trenches
were practically just as we had expected to find them, according to our
sample. They were so nearly similar to the duplicate section in which
we had practiced that we had no trouble finding our way in them. I was
just thinking that really the only tough part of the job remaining
would be getting back across No Man’s Land, when it seemed that the
whole earth behind me rose in the air. For a moment I was stunned and
half blinded by dirt blown into my face. When I was able to see, I
discovered that all that lay back of me was a mass of upturned earth
and rock, with here and there a man shaking himself or scrambling out
of it, or lying still.
“The philosophy of the British Tommies and the Canadians and the
Australians on the Somme was a remarkable reflection of their fine
courage through all that hell. They go about their work, paying no
attention to the flying death about them.
“‘If Fritz has a shell with your name and number on it,’ said a British
Tommy to me one day, ‘you’re going to get it, whether you’re in the
front line or seven miles back. If he hasn’t, you’re all right.’
“Fine fighters, all. And the Scotch kilties, lovingly called by the
Germans ‘the women from hell,’ have the respect of all armies. We
saw little of the _poilus_, except a few on leave. All the men were
self-sacrificing to one another in that big melting-pot from which so
few ever emerge whole. The only things it is legitimate to steal in
the code of the trenches are rum and ‘fags’ (cigarettes). Every other
possession is as safe as if it were under a Yale lock.”