It is an uncomfortable sensation to feel that over there muzzles are pointing straight at us. We are advancing almost as hurriedly and clumsily as 'rookies at their first field day.
As I move forward, I turn my head and look back. Behind me I sec new lines of skirmishers advancing one behind the other—supports to be pushed forward later.
What is that crawling along the ground behind our line?... there is one here, another over there—it looks so novel and so odd. They are crawling back out of the firing-line. And I see how one of them suddenly tries to rise, clutches his rifle with both hands, and hauls himself to his feet by his gun. And now he is spreading his arms out, tumbling over backwards, and flinging his hands away from him, far apart ... his hands are still flapping up and down on the grass. I am looking back as if fascinated while my legs keep on advancing.
But suddenly something begins to set up a rattle over there in the wood and buzzes like huge alarum-clocks running down.
"Lie down."
And there we are lying down, flat on our stomachs, as if we had already been mown down, for every man of us knows what that was. They have masked machine-guns in the wood over there; they are opening fire on us. I feel how my heart is thumping against my ribs. A machine-gun is equivalent to a company, the Old Man once explained to us, after we had been shot down in heaps to the last man by the machine-guns in the autumn manoeuvres.
What's the next thing?
Cautiously, without raising it, I turn my head. Behind us, too, the lines of skirmishers, close up to us, have disappeared from the face of the earth; they too, have gone to cover in the grass. Only outside the firing zone are they still being pushed forward.
Shall we have to retreat? Are we going to attack?
Then the order to fire rings out, and is zealously passed on from unit to unit.