“Are you hurt?”
“No, sir, but I can’t move. I thought you was dead.”
I clawed him out with feverish haste. The air reeked with smoke, and the shelling was hellish. Without any cessation shells burst in front of, above, and behind the trench; one could feel their hot breath on one’s cheek, and once I heard above the din a cry of agony that wrung my torn and tattered nerves to a state of anguish.
“Get out of here,” I yelled, and we crawled along the crumbling trench to the right.
“Hrrumph!” A five-nine landed just beyond us. I stopped a second. “Stretcher-bearer!” came weakly from a dim niche at my side. Huddled there was one of my boys. He was wounded in the foot, the leg, the chest, and very badly in the arm. It took five minutes to put on a tourniquet, and while it was being done a scout lying by my side was killed. He cried out once, turned, shivered, and died. I remember wondering how his soul could go up to Heaven through that awful concentration of fire and stinging smoke.
It was 6.15 P.M.
There were many wounded, many dead, one of those wonderfully brave men, a stretcher-bearer, told me, when he came crawling along, with blood-stained hands, and his little red-cross case. None of the wounded could be moved then, it was impossible. I got a message, and read it by the light of the star shells: “Please report at once if enemy are shelling your area heavily AAA.” The answer was terse: “Yes AAA.”
Suddenly there was a lull. One of those inexplicable, almost terrifying lulls that are almost more awesome than the noise preceding them. I heard a voice ten yards away, coming from a vague, shadowy figure lying on the ground:
“Are you all right, ‘P.’?” It was Ogilvie.
“Yes. Are you?”