examination paper to be given out; then we were at it.  Getting out of a trench to attack gives you an odd feeling of being just hatched.  Suddenly the world is big.  I don’t remember our gun fire stopping.  And then you rush.  ‘Come on!  Come on!’ say the officers.  Everybody gives a sort of howl and rushes.  When you see men dropping, you rush the faster.  The only thing that checks you at all is the wire twisted about everywhere.  You don’t want to trip over that.  The frightening thing is the exposure.  After being in the trenches so long you feel naked.  You run like a scared child for the German trench ahead.  I can’t understand the iron nerve of a man who can expose his back by turning to run away.  And there’s a thirsty feeling with one’s bayonet.  But they didn’t wait.  They dropped rifles and ran.  But we ran so fast after them that we caught one or two in the second trench.  I got down into that, heard a voice behind me, and found my two prisoners lying artful in a dug-out.  They held up their hands as I turned.  If they hadn’t I doubt if I should have done anything to them.  I didn’t feel like it.  I felt friendly.

“Not all the Germans ran.  Three or four stuck to their machine-guns until they got bayoneted.  Both the trenches were frightfully smashed about, and in the first one there were little knots and groups of dead.  We got to work at once shying the sandbags over from the old front of the trench to the parados.  Our guns had never stopped all the time; they were now plastering the third line trenches.  And almost at once the German shells began dropping into us.  Of course they had the range to an inch.  One didn’t have any time to feel and think; one just set oneself with all one’s energy to turn the trench over....

“I don’t remember that I helped or cared for a wounded man all the time, or felt anything about the dead except to step over them and not on them.  I was just possessed by the idea that we had to get the trench into a sheltering state before they tried to come back.  And then stick there.  I just wanted to win, and there was nothing else in my mind....

“They did try to come back, but not very much....

“Then when I began to feel sure of having got hold of the trench for good, I began to realise just how tired I was and how high the sun had got.  I began to look about me, and found most of the other men working just as hard as I had been doing.  ‘We’ve done it!’ I said, and that was the first word I’d spoken since I told my two Germans to come out of it, and stuck a man with a wounded leg to watch them.  ’It’s a bit of All Right,’ said Ortheris, knocking off also, and lighting a half-consumed cigarette.  He had been wearing it behind his ear, I believe, ever since the charge.  Against this occasion.  He’d kept close up to me all the time, I realised.  And then old Park turned up very cheerful with a weak bayonet jab in his forearm that he wanted me to rebandage.  It was good to see him practically all right too.