Almost Calm
“I heard directions given and I gave some myself. My voice was firm, and I felt almost calm. Our artillery had so torn up the German barbed wire that it gave us no trouble at all. We walked through it with only a few scratches. When we reached the low, sandbag parapet of the enemy trench we tossed in a few bombs and followed them right over as soon as they had exploded. There wasn’t a German in sight. They were all in their dugouts. But we knew pretty well where every dugout was located, and we rushed for the entrances with our bombs. Everything seemed to be going just as we had expected it to go. Two Germans ran plump into me as I rounded a ditch angle, with a bomb in my hand. They had their hands up and each of them yelled:
“‘Mercy, Kamerad!’
“I passed them back to be sent to the rear, and the man who received them from me chuckled and told them to step lively. The German trenches were practically just as we had expected to find them, according to our sample. They were so nearly similar to the duplicate section in which we had practiced that we had no trouble finding our way in them. I was just thinking that really the only tough part of the job remaining would be getting back across No Man’s Land, when it seemed that the whole earth behind me rose in the air. For a moment I was stunned and half blinded by dirt blown into my face. When I was able to see, I discovered that all that lay back of me was a mass of upturned earth and rock, with here and there a man shaking himself or scrambling out of it, or lying still.
“The philosophy of the British Tommies and the Canadians and the Australians on the Somme was a remarkable reflection of their fine courage through all that hell. They go about their work, paying no attention to the flying death about them.
“‘If Fritz has a shell with your name and number on it,’ said a British Tommy to me one day, ‘you’re going to get it, whether you’re in the front line or seven miles back. If he hasn’t, you’re all right.’
“Fine fighters, all. And the Scotch kilties, lovingly called by the Germans ‘the women from hell,’ have the respect of all armies. We saw little of the poilus, except a few on leave. All the men were self-sacrificing to one another in that big melting-pot from which so few ever emerge whole. The only things it is legitimate to steal in the code of the trenches are rum and ‘fags’ (cigarettes). Every other possession is as safe as if it were under a Yale lock.”