"If only 'e 'adn't stopped," muttered several hoarsely. Life is chance!
The first great onslaught of artillery fire slackened towards mid-day, sharper crack of rifles and wicked splutter of machine guns becoming for the first time noticeable. Enemy shells became fewer and fewer, his power of resistance—weak from the opening—deteriorated to little more than a rout. The prisoners were swelling an already long roll ... nine or ten thousand on the nine-mile front.
Ribecourt, on the Normans' front, had fallen after a brief skirmish, the German last line of defence reached and artillery support was still far to the rear when the Ten Hundred, passing through the Division ahead, took upon their own shoulders the responsibility to carry the Push through its last two miles and to force the capitulation of Nine Wood, now plainly visible at the top of the next long incline.
They went for it, hell for leather, in a long line of skirmishers. Their rifles cracked with the rapidity that tells the marksmen—and they COULD shoot. But Fritz would not have any. They did not like (those who had time to look back on their record sprint) the nasty gleam of those Norman bayonets. It was a soft thing; they moved onwards unchecked even as during the rehearsal. Tanks ahead reached the hill-crest and stood black and ugly against the sky; further to the right one was burning with high leaping flames. The Normans panted up the slope, poured into the two quarries in one bloodthirsty rush to find "nothing doing," scrambled out again, and reaching the Wood's edge calmly pushed their way through with all the phlegm of veterans to their objective some thirty yards beyond the last row of trees and commenced to dig in. Someone spotted a sniper post, coolly stretched himself out on the ground, muttered: "Three hundred yards," and squinted along the sights. Ping, ping ... two bodies fell limp from a platform—up a leafy tree. The Private slowly cut two notches on his rifle-butt.
Two black, charred figures grinned hideously from out of the smouldering remains of a British aeroplane as the two Guernsey Brigade Scouts hastened back to their Headquarters, to report the objective carried with ONLY TEN CASUALTIES. Away by the narrow bridge above Marcoing one living and three dead machine gunners were lying in a mangled heap. Still further back a shattered lad, unable to move, stretched out right in the track of an oncoming tank, shrieked frenziedly for succour ... then abrupt silence as of a whistle shut off even while the eyes were rivetted fascinated on the inexorable crushing machine. A ghastly heap of tangled, mutilated bodies, unrecognisable as such except by the grey German uniform, were lying beneath a tank blown in by a shell—the crew huddled inside in a gruesome mass.
At the bottom of a hollow a grey-cloaked figure was bunched in that strange posture bearing the hall-mark of fast approaching death. His dull eyes filled with terror at the sound of my footsteps ... strange ingrained knowledge of the Hunnish method of dealing with similar cases pervaded his mind.
"It is—finish," he whispered pitifully in bad English.
"Where are you hit?" He shook his head slowly.
"It is finish," he reiterated weakly.
"Want anything—any water?"