After that we blacked our faces.  This is always done to prevent the whiteness of the skin from showing under the flare lights.  Also to distinguish your own men when you get to the Boche trench.

Then we wrote letters and gave up our identification discs and were served with persuader sticks or knuckle knives, and with “Mills” bombs.

The persuader is a short, heavy bludgeon with a nail-studded head.  You thump Fritz on the head with it.  Very handy at close quarters.  The knuckle knife is a short dagger with a heavy brass hilt that covers the hand.  Also very good for close work, as you can either strike or stab with it.

We moved up to the front trenches at about half-past ten.  At zero minus ten, that is, ten minutes of eleven, our artillery opened up.  It was the first bombardment I had ever been under, and it seemed as though all the guns in the world were banging away.  Afterwards I found that it was comparatively light, but it didn’t seem so then.

The guns were hardly started when there was a sound like escaping steam.  Jerry leaned over and shouted in my ear:  “There goes the gas.  May it finish the blighters.”

Blofeld came dashing up just then, very much excited because he found we had not put on our masks, through some slip-up in the orders.  We got into them quick.  But as it turned out there was no need.  There was a fifteen-mile wind blowing, which carried the gas away from us very rapidly.  In fact it blew it across the Boche trenches so fast that it didn’t bother them either.

The barrage fire kept up right up to zero, as per schedule.  At thirty seconds of eleven I looked at my watch and the din was at its height.  At exactly eleven it stopped short.  Fritz was still sending some over, but 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.