The captain again raised his right hand. His eyes were on his watch. The second hand was ticking round to 5.30.
The men stood with outstretched hands grasping the wall of the trench in front of them to leap up and out.
Abruptly the captain’s hand fell. “Let’s go.”
And with a wild shout of exultation men of that company, and men of other companies on either side, miles up and down the trench, were up and over, in pursuit of the smoke screen—and the Hun.
CHAPTER V
Thiaucourt at Any Cost
SHOCK troops are all that the name itself implies. They are the troops sent forward, in human waves, to receive and break the first shock of contact with the enemy lines. Invariably a large number of them are doomed to death or injury, and the men themselves know it. But the very knowledge seems to drive them forward with greater fury, and the clash, therefore, is one of carnage for one or both sides.
These were the shock troops that were going over with the dawn against the entrenched Germans—if they still remained entrenched after the terrible fire to which they had been subjected for hours by the massed American artillery, augmented by the world-known French 75’s.
Even through the rolling smoke screen the light was becoming stronger, and Tom, Ollie and Harper, plodding ahead rapidly with their comrades, knew that soon it would be full dawn, that the screen would be lifted, and behind a barrage of fire that still would precede them for a short distance, the infantry would come to position to launch its close-range avalanche of rifle and machine gun bullets upon the enemy.
It was just as they were beginning to quicken the pace that Tom heard a grunt and a gasp, followed by a muttered word or two, and looking down upon his left side saw Ollie, almost up to his neck in a huge hole dug by one of the shells with which the Boche had made futile effort to stop the American fire.