I was lying there half asleep when suddenly all hell broke loose. The first thing I could think of in my muddled way was a typewriter. It sounded just like that. It was a machine-gun, and the bullets were whizzing overhead. The next thing was a barrage of whiz-bangs, and boy! they sure came fast. If they banged on the other side of the trench, you were lucky. I said to myself, ‘Well, I’d better see what’s going on.’ So I got out and looked around. I thought that this was the usual early morning strafe that we had to get used to. So I eased myself back into the hole and was just about to open a tin of beans when I thought I’d better look again. When I did, I found that the fellows were all out of their funk-holes, and that a man was running over the top right by me. I said, ‘What’s up?’ He said, ‘The Germans have overrun the front line! Our boys have all run away.’ So I said, ‘Well we’re in support. We’ll have to hold them here.’
So we got our rifles out and stood to, but in the darkness we couldn’t see anything. Then an officer appeared and he said, ‘Boys, we’ve got to go over the top and recapture that trench.’ As we started over the top, I thought, ‘Well, I am right so far, so I lit a cigarette, and right then somebody called out, ‘Stretcher bearer! Stretcher bearers on the double.’ I looked around and saw that somebody had been hit.
After going some little distance, we came to a communication trench and got into it. Then the officer yelled, ‘Up the trench and bomb them out!’ So we started up the trench in single file, and I was third. Suddenly, I saw my sergeant lying dead. We got just a short distance farther when a man came back and said to me, ‘Have you any bomb?’ ’No’ I said. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there are some Germans up there. We can hear them.’ I said, ‘I’ll go back and get some.’ When I started back I found that nobody had been following us. I said to the other two, ‘We’d better go back. They want us to establish a strong point.’ This we did with sandbags, and we mounted a machine-gun. All the others were standing to and firing at dim shadows they could barely see ahead of them. So I said to the other sergeant, ‘Can you be sure that those are Germans or our own men?’ He said, ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps we should stop firing.’ At that, he instructed to stop. That’s how much confusion there was. As a result of this little engagement we lost 75 of the 750 men in the battalion.
continued…
*Credit Note: from At the Forks of the Grand, Vol. 2, D. A. Smith, Paris Public Library Board
