thousands of men go over, wave after wave.

The terrain was level out to the point where the little hill of
High Wood rose covered with the splintered poles of what had once
been a forest. This position and the supports to the left and rear
of it began to fairly belch machine-gun and shell fire. If Fritz
had been quiet before, he gave us all he had now.

Our battalion went over from the second trench, and we got the
cream of it.

The tanks were just ahead of us and lumbered along in an imposing
row. They lurched down into deep craters and out again, tipped and
reeled and listed, and sometimes seemed as though they must upset;
but they came up each time and went on and on. And how slow they
did seem to move! Lord, I thought we should never cover that five
or six hundred yards.

The tank machine guns were spitting fire over the heads of our
first wave, and their Hotchkiss guns were rattling. A beautiful
creeping barrage preceded us. Row after row of shells burst at just
the right distance ahead, spewing gobs of smoke and flashes of
flame, made thin by the bright sunlight. Half a dozen airplanes
circled like dragonflies up there in the blue.

There was a tank just ahead of me. I got behind it. And marched
there. Slow! God, how slow! Anyhow, it kept off the machine-gun
bullets, but not, the shrapnel. It was breaking over us in clouds.
I felt the stunning patter of the fragments on my tin hat, cringed
under it, and wondered vaguely why it didn't do me in.