two days and we were well tied down to hugging what little shelter was left us. This was mostly the sections of breast’work that were braced or supported at a traverse. Most of the unsupported parts were all gone or nearly so. Shrapnel and high explosive shells were well mixed with mustard or tear gas shells especially through the night proceeding the attack by chlorine gas. This tear gas inflamed the lungs, throat, nostrils, and eyes until we were nearly blind even before the chlorine came over at all. Towards midday of the day before the assault I began to see by evidence all around me that I would have to strengthen the shelter at that place if I hoped to live much longer in the storm of shells. I worked all that afternoon and by piling up bags etc. made an embankment that was still more or less intact when we left that place later on. I know I would not have survived in that spot without the extra bit of shelter that instinct told me to build at that time. The Germans started to enfilade our section of the trench with a gun battery somewhere to the north and were doing great damage with this fire.
Knobel, our scout sergeant, had established an observation post in an old building close behind our front lines. He had us scouts hunting the country-side the night before for a ladder to put up behind the wall of this old building so he could get up to a shell hole he wanted to look from. We could not find a ladder but ripped a set of stairs out of a house about half a mile back carrying it bodily down there and putting it up for his O. P. He knew what he was driving at too. He was after the observer that was directing that enfilading enemy battery and he located him, watching him in the act of using a field telephone to the battery. After having gauged the map location correctly, our lone 18 pounder put a shell directly on him and then the enfilading stopped for awhile.
Just before daylight on the night we carried the stair-case we went to another old farm close behind our supports and lit a bonfire that would smoke, and smudge, and smolder for hours. The Germans took it for a cooking fire of troops in support plunking shells into that spot all day, and that was so many shells that never killed anyone.
The morning that we did all this I got very hungry from doing much hustling around the country, and seeing a fairly good looking tin of bully- beef sticking out of the mud, I nailed it, opened it, and ate part of it getting poisoned and was so sick I rolled on the ground with the pain. I don’t know if ptomaine poisoning is an antidote for chlorine or not but I had my full share of both and am still able to tell about it.
There was a corporal by the name of Harris who was armourer in our company and did any small repairs on rifles etc. He was a fine fellow and the afternoon before the gas attack he and I lay together behind the strengthened spot in the breast’work while a hundred kinds of scientific death smashed down, shrieking, roaring, crashing and rattling about our ears. He had a premonition that his hour was at hand and talked quietly about it. He showed me a picture of his wife and their two little children, a sweet looking trio they were too. It must have been a hard thing for him looking at them there and then. I saw him dying of gas poisoning the next day.
There was a peculiar thing happened to us as we sheltered behind that pile of heaped sand bags. A string of enemy shells pumped one after another into the front and base of that double traverse, until we counted 12 that drove in, repeatedly we could feel the heave and bulge of the earth in front of us and below, without a live shell in the whole lot. The fuse setter must have been a casualty on that gun for awhile, or our Guardian Angel was on the job, and we were not to be blown up that day. Every little while fritz would sweep the breaches and torn spots in our defense with savage bursts of machine gun fire. We of course on our side were not able to make much comeback to all this for we had practically no artillery at all and we were trying to save as many men and scanty machine guns as we could for the hour of assault that we knew was not far away. The day wore on with the night shell fire never ceasing although there were more mustard gas shells and less H. E. during the night. I remember we got so exhausted mentally and physically that we felt as though we were suspended with some sort of wire. There were pauses two or three times in the tornado of fire, that came suddenly, with every gun pausing at once. In those moments of sudden stillness we would drop and slump down into sleep in a second of time, and our heads would fall on our breasts as one man. It was as though we were strung on a taut wire and somebody had cut that wire. Gray light of another morning with the shell fire dribbling off gradually to a desultory fire lessening as though they had exhausted themselves with a long drawn out excess of hate and fury. We must have stolen a few odd winks of sleep during this gray hour just before dawn, for we were awake now and peering toward the enemy line through the misty light for this is the favorite hour for an assault when the light is too poor for the defense to shoot accurately, but not too dark for the attackers to make their way over the ground fairly well. We strained our eyes through the swollen up puffed slits that served us for eye lids. The tear gas had not left us with much in the way of clear vision by now.
We saw what looked like a whitish wall of smoke about 15 feet high all across the enemy front. The word snapped along the line. We thought they were going to come over behind a smoke screen. We watched it coming slowly across, and when it was about half way we opened rifle fire into it for we figured the enemy would be forming for the attack behind the smoke screen. We wanted to get the lead flying into them as soon as they were out of their trenches. That smoky wall moved nearer and when it got close you could see it was not white at all but a dirty yellow toward the top, shading from that to green down next to the ground. It seemed to hug the earth running and flowing thickly into every low place and follow depressions in the ground. It was thick near the earth and progressively thinner towards its crest. We manned what was left of our defenses pouring lead into that smoky wall, then it was over our trench, and among us, and we knew it was no smoke screen. We began to choke and strangle with it, asking one another what in Hell this could be, when a tornado of machine gun, rifle, and shell fire swept down on us again to hold us close to the ground so we would get the full benefit of the gas treatment. The poison did not take immediate effect except in a couple of cases and these two men had been old dope addicts. During their travels in France, they had secured some more of the cocaine or (snow) or what ever it was that they used to light up on and had started playing with it again. When the chlorine hit them they only lasted a very short time, then snuffed out like candles. I am rather hazy about some of the details but it must have been nearly an hour before some of the men started to show yellowish foam from the mouth and nostrils, then beginning to double up in the throws of strangulation exactly as one drowning. All through that day and on into the next they kept dropping off. It was not so bad if one could keep still and quiet and not go in for any exertion, or movement or deep breathing. As soon as one moved about the foam, boiled up through your throat and nostrils choking you off. We would lie flat on our faces holding onto grass or anything to steady us till the spasms passed and we could get our breath again. Excitement under these kind of conditions accounted for a lot of deaths by strangulation.
When fritz thought that his medical treatment had sufficient time to work he made one final shower of machine gun fire and shrapnel, then they started to come over to what he evidently thought was a place of the dead. I could see them popping up over their trench in hundreds and then down into a slight sag close in front. The old Mark 3 Ross had a sight on the bridge that folded down, and when down a course notch in the top of it giving a point blank range of 600 yards. The adjustable peep sight was useless to us now owing to the condition of our eyes as a result of mustard or tear gas. We used the old open battle-sight aiming a bit low and there were a good many Germans that fell back into the trench instead of jumping down in front for the start across. The first attack got most of the way across. You could see the officers pointing directions to this and that and machine gun crews trying to set up tripod guns so they could return our fire. In that first advance some stragglers got within about 30 yards of us, and there, were drilled full of holes.
Our rifles were coated with a thick furry coat of red rust from the action of the gas. All metal parts first turned a sort of pink or lavender, then changed from that to green, then black, and finally to red rust in a thick coat over all the working parts. They become stiff and hard to work and no small wonder. We would drop the butt to the ground and kick the bolt open with a foot. The straight pull action made this possible. As long as the bolt handle held out you could still do business at the old stand
