CHAPTER III[ToC]
ATTACK
Dawn was breaking. The morning was cool after a chill night—a night of waiting in blown-down trenches with not an inch to move to right or left, of listening to the enemy's shells as they left the guns and came tearing and shrieking towards you, knowing all the time that they were aimed for your particular bit of trench and would land in it or by it, of awaiting that sudden, ominous silence, and then the crash—perhaps death.
I, for my part, had spent most of the night sitting on a petrol tin, wedged between the two sides of the trench and two human beings—my sergeant on the left and a corporal on the right. Like others, I had slept for part of the time despite the noise and danger, awakened now and then by the shattering crash of a shell or the hopeless cry for stretcher-bearers.
But morning was coming at last, and the bombardment had ceased. The wind blew east, and a few fleecy clouds raced along the blue sky overhead. The sun was infusing more warmth into the air. There was the freshness and splendour of a summer morning over everything. In fact, as one man said, it felt more as if we were going to start off for a picnic than for a battle.
"Pass it down to Sergeant H—— that Sergeant S——l wishes him the top o' the mornin'," said my sergeant. But Sergeant H——, who was in charge of the company's Lewis-guns, and had been stationed in the next fire-trench, was at present groping his way to safety with a lump of shrapnel in his back.
An occasional shell sang one way or the other. Otherwise all was quiet. We passed down the remains of the rum. Sergeant S——l pressed me to take some out of a mess-tin lid. I drank a very little—the first and last "tot" I took during the battle. It warmed me up. Some time after this I looked at my watch and found it was a minute or two before 6.25 A.M. I turned to the corporal, saying—
"They'll just about start now."
The words were not out of my mouth before the noise, which had increased a trifle during the last twenty minutes, suddenly swelled into a gigantic roar. Our guns had started. The din was so deafening that one could not hear the crash of German shells exploding in our own lines.