March 29, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
17 
upon the table. His adjutant took four tallow candles 
stuck in bottles, lit them, and placed a bottle on each 
of the four corners of the map. The map was covered 
with irregular lines which in places tied themselves up 
into knots like congested veins and double lines of red 
crosses marched with them. Here and there were 
clusters of red stars and occasionally a blue blot. The 
stars were craters ; the blue blots were unexploded 
mines. He was still poring over this chart when the 
company conmianders arrived. 
" We attack to-morrow," he said quietly, as they 
saluted. 
" At what hour, sir ? " asked one of them with studied 
nonchalance. 
" I don't know," said the colonel, " soon after dawn 
I expect. I have not had ' zero ' yet. Now, gentlemen, 
this is the Divisional objective — 20 x A 83 to 20 x D 72." 
And he mo\ed his pencil across the rectangle. " The 
compass bearing on which the battalion will march will 
be 73 magnetic. The first and second waves will take 
the German first-line trench ; the third and fourth waves 
will take the second-line trench. The bombing parties 
nmst bomb their way up the communication trenches 
East of Nose Switch and A company must occupy the 
trench behind them." 
The colon,el and the adjutant, together with the major 
and the four company commanders, peered at the map, 
their heads, which were close together, throwing great 
shadows on the walls of the dug-out as the colonel ex- 
j)lained in detail the nature of their respective tasks. 
I'"inally the adjutant wrote them down in duplicate on a 
" Message and Signals " form, and gave each officer 
his copy. Then they went their appointed ways to 
confer with their platoon commanders. There were 
many things to do, but every one of them found time 
to do another that was not in his Operation Orders — they 
each wrote a letter home. 
The colonel sent for a R.F.A. subaltern com- 
manding the Stokes guns. " Your barrage will commence 
at minus eight minutes and cease at zero," he read out, 
explaining circumstantially that they must establish 
the said barrage from the right of trench A 7/1 to the • 
left of trench A 7/2 with a view to covering the enemy's 
machine-guns. And he handed him orders which 
told him how many rounds his sub-sections were to fire 
in the first minute, how many in the last, and how many 
in the six minutes intervening. 
Two hours after midnight the runners arrived with 
another message. It was as brief as it was fateful. It 
told the colonel that " zero " had been fi.xed for 6.30 a.m. 
The men were called in at 4.30 a.m. for " Stand to," 
and paraded in sections by the corporals. The rum 
ration was served out and every man was given 100 
e.xtra rounds of ammunition by the company sergeant- 
major. They moved off by platoons up the com- 
munication trench to the assembly trenches which 
extended in straight lines, without traverses, behind the 
fue-trenches, each trench about eighty yards apart. 
Every infantryman carried two empty s^and-bags stuck 
in his belt like a pair of gloves, a bomb in either pocket, 
a pick or a spade upon his back, a gas-mask, and he 
held his rifle at " the carry." At the head of each 
platoon marched the bombing parties carrying their 
little oyster-like bombs in a nose-bag attached to their 
belts. Every man- wore a vivid patch of coloured cloth 
upon his shoulder, and on the back of his tunic was a 
small piece of burnished tin which gleamed in the 
flaslies that ever and anon lit up tjie sky. For the most 
part they marched in silence up the long ravine, but 
occasionally they chaffed one another ; some of them 
smoked cigarettes with great rapiditv, throwing them 
away before they were half-consumed! 
As they lined up in the assemblv-trenches John 
Knighton, who was on the extreme left, pulled a large 
tin watch out of his pocket and shaking it solemnly 
peered at it in the pale light of dawn. The watch, which 
he had bought for five shillings one market-day at 
Marlborough, was a subject of manv jiieasantries in his 
platoon, for it never kept time. Hut Jolm Knighton 
treasured it above rubies and was accustomed to check 
Its idiosyncrasies by the stars and the position of the 
sun in the heavens. The hour and minute hands were 
at six o'clock. 
" Bist gwine to have ver old ticker synchronized by the 
signalling-officer, John ? " said his neighbour, nervously 
fingering the safety-catch of his rifle. 
" Did ye leave yer hairloom to ycr best girl in yer 
pay-book," asked another. "Lawk a massey, look "at 
that girt 'uii ! ' 
There was a gurgling sound in the air overhead and a 
9.2 shell burst on a " strong point " in the German lines, 
sending up a geyser of black smoke which, as it drifted 
away, slowly formed the pattern of a gigantic weeping- 
willow upon the sky. All through the night a sound as 
of someone knocking at a door had been coming from 
behind the lines, and the air overhead was never still. 
" Fix bayonets," said the platoon commander suddenly, 
as he looked at his watch, and with a clink fixed his own 
in the socket. 
The hands of the platoon commander's watch were 
at nineteen minutes past six. The bombardment died 
away. There was a lull, 
IV. 
At that moment the subaltern in charge of the fire- 
control of a battery of field-guns some three thousand 
five hundred yards back, was waiting \viU\ a stop-watch 
in one hand and a megaphone in the other at the elbow 
of the telephone orderly just beside the battery. The 
Operation orders had been given out the night before ; 
the fuses had been set with the fuse-key, and the corrector 
put at 148. A pile of shells lay banked like drain-pipes 
under a tarpaulin painted in a mottled pattern of greens 
and browns. Each gun-layer sat beside his 
jun, and 
the other men of the gun detachment knelt behind, 
stripped to their waists, their shirt-slee\-es rolled up 
exposing their sinewy arms. At the other end of that 
telephone-wire, some three thousand yards in front of 
the battery, were the battery major" and the F.O.O., 
established in a low-turfed emplacement like a grouse- 
butt. The telephone orderly siuldenly answered the 
battery-major through the telephone : " Yes, sir," 
and as he did so turned his eyes towards the subaltern. 
Then he began repeating each monosyllable of the O.C.'s 
message one by one as they came through. " Ten, 
nine, eight, seven, six " — the subaltern was strangely 
conscious, as he listened, with his eyes on his stop-watch, 
of a scene on the tow-path at Oxford two years ago as he 
had sat leaning over an oar with his feet planted firmly 
against the stretcher and his heart thumping a response to 
the coach's measured tones—" five, four, three, two, one. 
Fire ! " 
" Fire ! " shouted the subaltern through his megaphone 
to the subalterns in charge of the guns. 
The storm burst. Forward in the assembly-trenches 
it buffetted the ears of the men— a mighty knocking 
upon great doors, but this time it was as if blows 
were being rained upon all the doors of all the houses 
e\'er built with hands. A thousand field-guns were 
firing sixteen to twenty rounds a minute, as fast as 
the sweating gunners could open and close the breech. 
The sound grew more and more insistent, and each 
man in the assembly-trenches looked at his neighbour 
with a wild surmise, shouting to make the other hear. 
The shells went spinning overhead with a long metallic 
scream. They were H.E. shells with " delay " fuses, 
and, as they burrowed into the German fire-trench, they 
threw up spouts of black earth like waves upon a pro- 
montory, and black smoke rose at even intervals above 
its parapet and drifted along horizontally as though it 
screened a line of locomotives travelling up a cutting. 
At the same moment the trench-mortars in our evacuated 
front-line began to give forth their dull thudding note, 
increasing in frequency as the first minute passed. In 
the sap in front of it, two machine-guns, traversing the 
German front line with a " two-inch tap," added their 
rapid knuckle-rapping to the brazen fury of the storm. 
" The orchestra's tuning up, mates," shouted one man 
with a nervous laugh, " I'rogrammes sixpence each." 
But no one heard him. All eyes were fixed on the 
platoon commander, who was looking at his wrist-watch. 
Each man put his left foot in a foot-hole cut in the wall 
of the trench and, reaching up, firmly gripped a stake in 
the parapet above him. They leaned forward with 
