comparatively there was silence. After the ear-splitting racket it was almost still enough to hurt.
And in that silence over the top we went.
Lanes had been cut through our wire, and we got through them quickly. The trenches were about one hundred
twenty yards apart and we still had nearly one hundred to go. We dropped and started to crawl. I skinned both
my knees on something, probably old wire, and both hands. I could feel the blood running into my puttees,
and my rifle bothered me as I was afraid of jabbing Jerry, who was just ahead of me as first bayonet man.
They say a drowning man or a man in great danger reviews his past. I didn't. I spent those few minutes
wondering when the machine-gun fire would come.
I had the same "gone" feeling in the pit of the stomach that you have when you drop fast in an elevator. The
skin on my face felt tight, and I remember that I wanted to pucker my nose and pull my upper lip down over
my teeth.
We got clean up to their wire before they spotted us. Their entanglements had been flattened by our barrage
fire, but we had to get up to pick our way through, and they saw us.
Instantly the "Very" lights began to go up in scores, and hell broke loose. They must have turned twenty
machine guns on us, or at us, but their aim evidently was high, for they only "clicked" two out of our
immediate party. We had started with ten men, the other fifty being divided into three more parties farther
down the line.
When the machine guns started, we charged. Jerry and I were ahead as bayonet men, with the rest of the party
following with buckets of "Mills" bombs and "Stokeses."
It was pretty light, there were so many flares going up from both sides. When I jumped on the parapet, there
was a whaling big Boche looking up at me with his rifle resting on the sandbags. I was almost on the point of
his bayonet.
For an instant I stood with a kind of paralyzed sensation, and there flashed through my mind the instructions
of the manual for such a situation, only I didn't apply those instructions to this emergency.
Instead I thought--if such a flash could be called thinking--how I, as an instructor, would have told a rookie to
act, working on a dummy. I had a sort of detached feeling as though this was a silly dream.
Probably this hesitation didn't last more than a second.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jerry lunge, and I lunged too. Why that Boche did not fire I don't
know. Perhaps he did and missed. Anyhow I went down and in on him, and the bayonet went through his
throat.
Jerry had done his man in and all hands piled into the trench.
Then we started to race along the traverses. We found a machine gun and put an eleven-pound high-explosive
"Stokes" under it. Three or four Germans appeared, running down communication trenches, and the bombers
sent a few Millses after them. Then we came to a dug-out door--in fact, several, as Fritz, like a woodchuck,
always has more than one entrance to his burrow. We broke these in in jig time and looked down a thirty-foot
hole on a dug-out full of graybacks. There must have been a lot of them. I could plainly see four or five faces
looking up with surprised expressions.
CHAPTER III 15
Blofeld chucked in two or three Millses and away we went.
A little farther along we came to the entrance of a mine shaft, a kind of incline running toward our lines.
Blofeld went in it a little way and flashed his light. He thought it was about forty yards long. We put several
of our remaining Stokeses in that and wrecked it.
Turning the corner of the next traverse, I saw Jerry drop his rifle and unlimber his persuader on a huge
German who had just rounded the corner of the "bay." He made a good job of it, getting him in the face, and
must have simply caved him in, but not before he had thrown a bomb. I had broken my bayonet prying the
dug-out door off and had my gun up-ended--clubbed.
[Illustration: OVER THE TOP ON A RAID. Photograph from Underwood & Underwood, N.Y.]
When I saw that bomb coming, I bunted at it like Ty Cobb trying to sacrifice. It was the only thing to do. I
choked my bat and poked at the bomb instinctively, and by sheer good luck fouled the thing over the parapet.
It exploded on the other side.
"Blimme eyes," says Jerry, "that's cool work. You saved us the wooden cross that time."
We had found two more machine guns and were planting Stokeses under them when we heard the Lewises
giving the recall signal. A good gunner gets so he can play a tune on a Lewis, and the device is frequently
used for signals. This time he thumped out the old one--"All policemen have big feet." Rat-a-tat-tat--tat, tat.
It didn't come any too soon.
As we scrambled over the parapet we saw a big party of Germans coming up from the second trenches. They
were out of the communication trenches and were coming across lots. There must have been fifty of them,
outnumbering us five or six to one.
We were out of bombs, Jerry had lost his rifle, and mine had no "ammo." Blofeld fired the last shot from his
revolver and, believe me, we hooked it for home.
We had been in their trenches just three and a half minutes.
Just as we were going through their wire a bomb exploded near and got Jerry in the head. We dragged him in
and also the two men that had been clicked on the first fire. Jerry got Blighty on his wound, but was back in
two months. The second time he wasn't so lucky. He lies now somewhere in France with a wooden cross over
his head.
Did that muddy old trench look good when we tumbled in? Oh, Boy! The staff was tickled to pieces and
complimented us all. We were sent out of the lines that night and in billets got hot food, high-grade "fags", a
real bath, a good stiff rum ration, and letters from home.
Next morning we heard the results of the raid. One party of twelve never returned. Besides that we lost seven
men killed. The German loss was estimated at about one hundred casualties, six machine guns and several
dug-outs destroyed, and one mine shaft put out of business. We also brought back documents of value found
by one party in an officer's dug-out.
Blofeld got the military cross for the night's work, and several of the enlisted men got the D.C.M.
Altogether it was a successful raid. The best part of it was getting back.
Comments
Post a Comment