hardly call us "sissies" for doing so. It was a minute to four. I
could see the hand move to the twelve, then a dead silence. It hurt.
Everyone looked up to see what had happened, but not for long. Sharp
whistle blasts rang out along the trench, and with a cheer the men
scrambled up the ladders. The bullets were cracking overhead, and
occasionally a machine gun would rip and tear the top of the sand bag
parapet. How I got up that ladder I will never know. The first ten
feet out in front was agony. Then we passed through the lanes in our
barbed wire. I knew I was running, but could feel no motion below the
waist. Patches on the ground seemed to float to the rear as if I were
on a treadmill and scenery was rushing past me. The Germans had put a
barrage of shrapnel across No Man's Land, and you could hear the
pieces slap the ground about you.

After I had passed our barbed wire and gotten into No Man's Land, a
Tommy about fifteen feet to my right front turned around and looking
in my direction, put his hand to his mouth and yelled something which
I could not make out on account of the noise from the bursting shells.
Then he coughed, stumbled, pitched forward, and lay still. His body
seemed to float to the rear of me. I could hear sharp cracks in the
air about me. These were caused by passing rifle bullets. Frequently,
to my right and left, little spurts of dirt would rise into the air,
and a ricochet bullet would whine on its way. If a Tommy should see
one of these little spurts in front of him, he would tell the nurse
about it later. The crossing of No Man's Land remains a blank to me.

Men on my right and left would stumble and fall. Some would try to get
up, while others remained huddled and motionless. Then smashed-up
barbed wire came into view and seemed carried on a tide to the rear.
Suddenly, in front of me loomed a bashed-in trench about four feet