The signal, if the Huns attacked the French, was to be three red flares flying up in rapid succession. Our Intelligence Department was not asleep; the attack was expected at three o'clock and promptly on the minute it began. The French held easily and we were not needed.
Next morning I was sent back to my platoon and nothing very exciting happened except the sharp shelling by Fritz of our position until about ten o'clock, when a thing new to our experience came over. The noise was appalling. It was the commencement of the awful bombardment of Ypres.
CHAPTER XX
HELL LET LOOSE
That night we relieved the Tenth Battalion and took over the front line. Right from the beginning casualties piled up; the shell fire was terrific. In the lulls of the bombardment we dug frantically to consolidate our flimsy defenses. Barbed wire we had none; we simply threw out in front any obstructions we could find.
One amusing incident occurred here; I laugh at it now, although I did not at the time. The little dark man, Libby, was the hero. Libby translated means "Coolness and indifference to danger." A volume could be written of the events in which this man figured that for sheer daring almost surpassed belief. Libby and I were working on a traverse, which, as every one knows, is a cross-section of trench, and we were exerting every effort to fill bags of dirt and pile them up on this cross-section.
Buried underneath our trench were dead men planted as thickly as they could be laid. Digging down I turned up a boot containing a foot. "Stick it in," said Libby.
"Do you think I'm going to touch that thing with my hand?"
"What's the odds," said he, "but if you don't want to, shove it on the shovel with your foot."
I did so and he placed it in the sack, I holding the sack open, and the grisly thing touched my hand in passing. I shuddered, almost fainted, but never a sign of perturbation from Libby. Again he dug, this time bringing up the other foot, with the leg bone still sticking.