Occasionally a man would joke or tell a funny story. Those who heard him either looked as if they hadn’t heard or laughed rather thinly. It is one thing to go at them with steel and rifle, but quite another to sit around and wait for the short blast of the whistle which sends you out to kill or to be killed.
Our artillery was pouring shells and shrapnel upon the Huns and their guns were replying. The combat wagons with the ammunition and the wagons with the rations had to reach us through a curtain of fire. One hundred extra cartridges were distributed to every man, also extra tins of “bully.” I was on my way to regimental headquarters with a message, when a shell squarely struck a transport wagon. It was obliterated. Men were torn into shreds. I saw the whole fore-quarters of a horse blown high into a tree and caught there in a crotch. The stretcher bearers picked up some of the men. Some they could not even find. I was soon back again in the firing trench. We had gouged out little footholds to help us over the top.
At last it came—the little shrill metallic blast we had been waiting for. It could be heard distinctly above the roar of the artillery. The blood surged back into the faces of the pale men. We were fighting now. It was different from the waiting and thinking—the thinking of what we may be leaving behind us for always.
I was the first man out of the trench—not that I was brave, but because I had already learned that it was the last man up and the last man down who usually are shot. I sped ahead of all the platoon; for in that lay safety.
It is a fact that men in trenches will fire at the mass in rear rather than stop to aim at a single runner out ahead. Each man seems to feel that he is sure to hit someone if he fires into the mass and that another will pick off the leader.
We were back again in our own trenches. What had happened in the charge I did not know. I can honestly state that my mind is a blank for the period of time which elapsed after I ran the first fifty yards toward the boches.
I was sitting on the fire-step. We had taken their trenches and had been recalled after our troops from the rear had gone forward to prepare the captured position against the counter attack which would surely come.
My chum, Jock Hunter, was sitting near me.
“Blow ‘Coffee up,’” he said to me, laughing. I thought he had lost his senses. I stared at him blankly.