We looked at each other and smiled a little grimly. To be on the flank of an attack is rather worse than to attack, for it means sitting tight while Fritz pounds the life out of you.
“You stop here,” said Ogilvie, “in this glory-hole of ours, while I go up and see Niven. He will have to put his men in those forward saps. If you get any messages, deal with them, and make sure that Townley keeps those bombers of his on both sides of the road. They must stop there, as long as there are any of them left, or the Hun might try to turn our flank. So long.”
He set out towards the north, leaving me in “AK” Coy.’s “head-quarters.” The latter consisted of a little niche, three feet wide, ran back a foot, and was four feet high, cut in the parapet of the front line. The runner, Thomson, one of our own company, was curled up in a little cubby-hole at my feet, and had fallen asleep.
It was lonely in that trench, although there were invisible men, not thirty feet away, on both sides of me.
The time was 5.25 P.M.
Our guns were still silent. Fritz was warming up more and more. He was shelling our right most persistently, putting “the odd shell” around head-quarters.
Punctually to the minute our artillery started in. Salvos of heavies, way back, shrapnel all along the front line and supports.
A wickedly pretty sight along a thousands yard front: Fritz began to get irritated, finally to be alarmed. Up went his red lights, one after the other, as he called on his guns, called, and kept on calling. They answered the call. Above us the air hissed unceasingly as shells passed and exploded in rear. He was putting a barrage on our supports and communication trenches. Then he opened up all along our trench. High explosive shrapnel, and those thunder-crackling “woolly bears.” I wondered where Ogilvie was, if he was all right, and I huddled in close to the damp crumbling earth.
It was 5.50 P.M.
“Per-loph-UFF.” An acrid smell of burnt powder, a peculiar, weird feeling that my head was bursting, and a dreadful realisation that I was pinned in up to my neck, and could not stir. A small shell, bursting on graze, had lit in the parapet, just above my head, exploded, and buried me up to the neck, and the runner also. He called out, but the din was too great for me to hear what he said. I struggled until my hands were free, and then with the energy of pure fear tore at the shattered sand-bags that weighed me down. Finally I was free to bend over to Thomson.