The Agony of Waiting
“Our officers set their watches very carefully with those of the artillery officers before we went forward to the front trenches. We reached the front at 11 p. m., and not until our arrival there were we informed of the ’zero hour’—the time when the attack was to be made. The hour of 12:10 had been selected. The waiting from eleven o’clock until that time was simply an agony. Some of our men sat stupid and inert. Others kept talking constantly about the most inconsequential matters. One man undertook to tell a funny story. No one listened to it, and the laugh at the end was emaciated and ghastly. The inaction was driving us all into a state of funk. I could actually feel my nerve oozing out at my fingertips, and if we had had to wait fifteen minutes longer I shouldn’t have been able to climb out of the trench.”
Finally the moment for the attack arrived.
“We sneaked out, single file, making our way from shell-hole to shell-hole, nearly all the time on all-fours, crawling quickly over the flat places between the holes. The Germans had not sighted us, but they were squirting machine-gun bullets all over the place like a man watering a lawn with a garden-hose, and they were bound to get some of us. Behind me I heard cries of pain and groans, but this made little impression on my benumbed intelligence. From the mere fact that whatever had happened had happened to one of the other sections of ten and not to my own, it seemed, some way or other, no affair to concern me. Then a man in front of me doubled up suddenly and rolled into a shell-hole. That simply made me remember very clearly that I was not to stop on account of it. It was some one else’s business to pick that man up. Next, according to the queer psychology of battle, I began to lose my sensation of fear and nervousness. After I saw a second man go down, I gave my attention principally to a consideration of the irregularities of the German parapet ahead of us, picking out the spot where we were to enter the trench. It seems silly to say it, but I seemed to get some sort of satisfaction out of the realization that we had lost the percentage which we might be expected to lose going over. Now, it seemed, the rest of us were safe until we should reach the next phase of our undertaking.