A Yankee in the Trenches

I had ever been under, and it seemed as though all the guns in the world were banging away. Afterwards I found that it was comparatively light, but it didn’t seem so then.

The guns were hardly started when there was a sound like escaping steam. Jerry leaned over and shouted in my ear: “There goes the gas. May it finish the blighters.”

Blofeld came dashing up just then, very much excited because he found we had not put on our masks, through some slip-up in the orders. We got into them quick. But as it turned out there was no need. There was a fifteen-mile wind blowing, which carried the gas away from us very rapidly. In fact it blew it across the Boche trenches so fast that it didn’t bother them either.

The barrage fire kept up right up to zero, as per schedule. At thirty seconds of eleven I looked at my watch and the din was at its height. At exactly eleven it stopped short. Fritz was still sending some over, but comparatively there was silence. After the earsplitting racket it was almost still enough to hurt.

And in that silence over the top we went.

Lanes had been cut through our wire, and we got through them quickly. The trenches were about one hundred twenty yards apart and we still had nearly one hundred to go. We dropped and started to crawl. I skinned both my knees on something, probably old wire, and both hands. I could feel the blood running into my puttees, and my rifle bothered me as I was afraid of jabbing Jerry, who was just ahead of me as first bayonet 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 dugout door⁠—in fact, several, as Fritz, like a woodchuck, always has more than one entrance to his burrow. We broke these in in jig time and looked down a thirty-foot hole on a dugout full of graybacks. There must have been a lot of them. I could plainly see four or five faces looking up with surprised expressions.

Blofeld chucked in two or three Millses and away we went.

A little farther along we came to the entrance of a mine shaft, a kind of incline running toward our lines. Blofeld went in it a little way and flashed his light. He thought it was about forty yards long. We put several of our remaining Stokeses in that and wrecked it.

Turning the corner of the next traverse, I saw Jerry drop his rifle and unlimber his persuader on a huge German who had just rounded the corner of the “bay.” He made a good job of it, getting him in the face, and must have simply caved him in, but not before he had thrown a bomb. I had broken my bayonet prying the dugout door off and had my gun upended⁠—clubbed.

Over the top on a raid.

When I saw that bomb coming, I bunted at it like Ty Cobb trying to sacrifice. It was the only thing to do. I choked my bat and poked at the bomb instinctively, and by sheer good luck fouled the thing over the parapet. It exploded on the other side.

“Blimme eyes,” says Jerry, “that’s cool work. You saved us the wooden cross that time.”

We had found two more machine guns and were planting Stokeses under them when we heard the Lewises giving the recall signal. A good gunner gets so he can play a tune