"Where are you. Bill?" shouted one man to another. "I'm bogged. For God's sake give me a hand, old lad."
There was not a man who did not fall. "I fell a hundred times," said one of them. "It was nigh impossible to keep on one's feet for more than a yard or two."
So that little party of men went stumbling and staggering along, trying to work across the shell-holes.
"My pal Bert," said one man, "fell in deep, and then sank farther in. 'Charlie,' he cried. Two of us, and then four, tried to drag him out, but we slipped down the bank of the crater and rolled into the slime with him. I thought we should never get out. Some men were cursing and some were laughing in a wild way, and some were near crying with the cold. But somehow we got on."
Somehow they got on, and that is the wonder of it. They got on to the line of the attack half an hour before the guns were to start their drum-fire, and they joined the thousands of other men who had been lying out in the shell-holes all night, and were numbed with cold and waist-high in water.
Not all of them got there. The German guns had been busy most of the night, and big shells were coming over. Thirty men were killed or wounded with one shell, and others were hit and fell into the water-pools, and lay there till the stretcher-bearers—the splendid stretcher-bearers—came up to search for them.
The Lancashires, who had travelled eleven hours, had had no food all that time. "I would have given my left arm for a drop of hot drink," said one of them, "I was fair perished with cold."
Some of them had rum served out to them. They were the lucky ones, for it gave them a little warmth. But others could not get a drop.
One man, who was shaking with an ague when I met him this morning, had a pitiful tragedy happen to him. "I had a jar of rum in my pack," he said, "and the boys said to me, 'Keep it for us till we get over to the first objective. We'll want it most then.' But when I went over I dropped my pack. 'Oh, Christ!' I said, 'I've lost the rum!'"
They went over to the attack, these troops who were cold and hungry and exhausted after a dreadful night, and they gained their objective and routed the enemy, and sent back many prisoners. I marvel at them, and will salute them if ever I meet them in the world when the war is done.