I believe my thought, as we scrambled over the parapet was that now, at last, we were going to wipe Petticoat Lane off the map as a front line. Good-bye to this hole! That was the idea, I think. We did so hate that bit of line, with its quicksand craters in front, and the sodden lowness that made it a sort of pocket for the receipt of every kind of explosive the Boche liked to lob in on us. The struggle through the craters, before we got to the first Boche line, was pretty beastly, and, I am afraid, cost us rather dear, although we got to the near lip of the craters before the punishment began, thanks to a quick start and the fine accuracy of our gunners in their curtain fire. You know the sort of thing that happens in nightmares, when each of your feet weighs a ton and a half, at the moment when speed is the only thing to save you from the most hideous kind of spiflication. Getting through the craters was like that. Our good time began when the craters were passed, and there was nothing but Boche trenches in front of us. Then it was we began to feel the jolly feelings you've read about; the glorious exhilaration of the charge. And, really, it wouldn't be possible to exaggerate about that. You can take it from me that the most highly coloured chromo-lithographs can't overdo that, in the essential spirit of the thing. Their detail is pretty groggy, of course--no waving plumes, gay colours, flashing swords, and polished top-boots, you know. My goodness, no! We were all the colour of the foul clay we'd come from--all over. But the spirit of it! It's perfectly hopeless for me to try to tell you, especially in a letter. They say they pump spirits and drugs into the Boches before they leave their trenches. No drug and no champagne, even of the choicest, could have given us any more exhilaration, I fancy, than one felt in that dash from the craters to the first Boche line. Heavens! but it was the real thing; real, real, real; that's what it was, more than anything else. Made you feel you'd never been really and fully alive till then. Seven-leagued boots, and all that kind of thing, you know. The earth seemed to fly under your feet. I can see the dirty, earth-smeared faces in that Boche trench now. (They were scuffling and scrambling out from the dug-outs, where they'd sheltered from our bombardment, to their fire-steps.) They seemed of no more importance than so many Aunt Sallies or Dutch dolls. Things like that to stop _us_! Absurd! And how one whooped! I was fairly screaming "'A' Company!" at the very top of my voice as we jumped into that trench. The man on my left was Corporal Slade (Lance-Sergeant, I should say) and, as we reached their parapet I could hear him yelling beside my ear, through all the roar of the guns: "Hell! Give 'em hell! Give 'em hell, boys!" Most outrageous!