morning, deadly quiet, as was usual at that time of the trench day
when the tenseness of the all-night vigil was just merging into the
relieving daylight.

At half past six that stillness was punctuated by a single shell,
which broke barely in our rear. And then the ball commenced--the most
intense bombardment we had yet experienced. Most of the fire came from
the batteries in concealed positions on our right, whence, as on the
fourth, they poured in a very destructive enfilade fire which swept up
and down the length of the trench like the stream of a hose, making it
a shambles. Each burst of high-explosive shells, each terrible
pulsation of the atmosphere, if it missed the body, seemed to rend the
very brain, or else stupefied it.

The general result was beyond any poor words of mine. All spoken
language is totally inadequate to describe the shocks and horrors of
an intense bombardment. It is not that man himself lacks the
imaginative gift of words but that he has not the word tools with
which to work. They do not exist. Each attempt to describe becomes
near effrontery and demands its own separate apology.

In addition, kind Nature draws a veil for him over so much of all the
worst of it that many details are spared his later recollection. He
remembers only the indescribable confusion and the bursting claps of
near-by flame, as foul in color and as ill of smell as an addled egg.
He knows only that the acid of the high-explosive gas eats into the
tissue of his brain and lungs, destroying with other things, most
memories of the shelling.

Overhead an aeroplane buzzed. We could even descry the figures of the
pilot and his observer, the latter signaling. No gun of ours answered.
The dead and dying lay all about and none could attend them: A rifle
was a rifle.

This continued for an hour, at the end of which time we poked our
heads up and saw their infantry coming on in columns of mobs, and some
of them also very prettily in the open order we had ourselves been
taught. Every field and hedge spewed them up. We stood, head and
shoulders exposed above the ragged parapet, giving them "Rapid-fire."
They had no stomach for that and retired to their holes, leaving many
dead and grievously wounded.

It was at this time that we saw the troops on our flanks falling back
in orderly fashion. I called that fact to the attention of Lieutenant
Lane, who was the only officer left in our vicinity. He said that the
last word he had r