I could not feel my legs. I seemed to be flying. The strumming of a
machine gun broke upon my consciousness. I leaped headlong into a shell
hole. Dead men were around me and wounded lay thrashing there. Other
men leaped on me and fell into the pit. We lay there until the sound of
the machine gun stopped, then we started madly again for our own lines.
A star shell burst and merciless light made everything stand out with
terrifying plainness. It is cadaverous light, like that from a mercury
tube.
We plunged into another shell hole. When the rest of the men came
tearing past us we leaped out and followed them. I am not proud of my
conduct in my first fight.
After this assault I gradually became accustomed to the noise and shock
of artillery fire. We could hear the shells coming, passing over our
heads and speeding away in the distance. It is a strange fact that
after a few weeks of artillery fire one develops a sort of instinct
which distinguishes between a shell coming toward him and one just
sailing off somewhere else in space.
I got so that shells all around me did not bother me, but let one come
in my direction and this extra sense seemed to know it, and I would be
flat on the ground before I had time to think about it.
It was at Belloy-en-Santerre, on the Somme, July 2, 1916, that I had
a chance to ease my conscience for the way I had acted as a green
recruit. Everything was made ready for an assault by our troops. The
town had been literally knocked to pieces.
There was a wide strip of terrain between the trenches at this point,
but all of us were by now accustomed to feel the breath of death
against our cheeks, and when the big guns stopped roaring there came
the familiar "_En avant, mes enfants! On les aura!_" We leaped over the
parapets and tore across at them.
The artillery had made their first-line trenches almost untenable. The
only men left in them were the machine gun operators in their heavily
armored turrets and they kept spraying devastation among our legs until
some of the boys got round behind and threw grenades into the turrets.
After that the machine guns were quiet.
We reorganized when we had reached the first defences. I don't know how
many of the boys were flattened out against the ground behind us, but
I do know that several companies had to be consolidated to make one.
Then we swarmed over to the next defence line and stabbed and slashed
and threw grenades. Parties of us ran to the bombproofs and threw in
everything explosive that we had, and let me tell you that, all stories
to the contrary notwithstanding, I never knew of anybody going down
into a bombproof and being stabbed by Prussians who said they were
wounded and needed help, because nobody ever goes into a bombproof to
see until they have thrown grenades in and all is quiet. It would be
foolish to do otherwise.
As I have said before, it is a rotten war any way you look at it.