"For some hours before the Battalion moved off to take up its position, the Huns shelled the area with gas shells. Fortunately, however, just before 11 p.m., the time for starting, a breeze sprang up, and we were able to move without wearing gas masks.
"The move up was not pleasant. The area had been much fought over, it had been impossible to bury the dead for ten days, and it was a hot July!
"Our artillery was firing to cover our move up. Just after passing Longueval one of our shells dropped, unfortunately, near the platoon which, with the C.O., I was following. As luck would have it, though, only one man was badly wounded. The platoon, of course, went on, and the C.O. went over to the man who had been hit.
"'It's hard lines, sir,' said the man.
"'I know it is,' said the C.O., 'but you will soon be all right. The stretcher-bearers are coming.'
"'Oh, it's not that,' was the man's rejoinder. 'It's being hit now! Here have I been all this time in France without having a real go at the b——s, and now the chance has come, here I go and get knocked out.'
"The C.O. made only one remark to me as we passed on. It was: 'Well, if that's what the rest of the Battalion feels, I have no fears for to-morrow.'
"We took up our position in a trench at the edge of the wood. This was all that remained after the South Africans had been beaten back, and our attack was to start at dawn on the following morning. This attack was in two parts, two companies to take the first objective, a trench in the centre of the wood, and two companies to capture the far edge, and dig themselves in there. The 1/60th were on our right, each battalion having half the wood allotted to it.
"The waves formed up in position shortly before dawn, and it was our first experience of going over the top as a battalion. The men, however, were quite cool and cheerful; in fact, one, named Lewis Turner, asked me, 'How long to go?' I looked at my watch, and said, 'Five minutes.' His reply was, 'Oh, then I've time to finish my breakfast.' And he did.
"At zero our barrage started, and our first waves were off, the thing I noticed most being that most of the men were smoking as they went over. The whole wood was immediately full of machine-gun bullets. There must have been hundreds of machine guns—up in trees, hidden in the undergrowth, in fact all over the place. The Hun artillery came down on all the approaches to the wood, but not on the wood itself so long as any of their own men were in it.