Joe touched his gas-mask with a sneer: "He’s pushin’ the yellow stuff at us, Heinie," he said; and to me: "You get _yours_ all right. I don’t know what it is, but you get it, same as me an’ Heinie an’ Duck. _I_ don’t know what it is," he repeated impatiently; "maybe it’s dough; maybe it’s them suffragettes with their silk feet an’ white gloves what clap their hands at you. _I_ ain’t saying nothin’ to _you_, am I? Then lemme alone an’ go an’ talk business with Duck over there----" Officers passed rapidly between the speaker and me and continued east and west along the ranks of riflemen, repeating in calm, steady voices: "Fix bayonets, _mes enfants_; make as little noise as possible. Everybody ready in ten minutes. Ladders will be distributed. Take them with you. The bomb-throwers will leave the trench first. Put on goggles and respirators. Fix bayonets and set one foot on the pegs and ladders ... all ready in seven minutes. Three mines will be exploded. Take and hold the craters.... Five minutes!... When the mines explode that is your signal. Bombers lead. Give them a leg up and follow.... Three minutes...." From a communication trench a long file of masked bomb-throwers appeared, loaded sacks slung under their left arms, bombs clutched in their right hands; and took stations at every ladder and row of freshly driven pegs. "One minute!" repeated the officers, selecting their own ladders and drawing their long knives and automatics. As I finished adjusting my respirator and goggles a muffled voice at my elbow began: "Be a sport, Doc! Gimme a chanst! Make it fifty-fifty----" "_Allez!_" shouted an officer through his respirator. Against the sky all along the parapet’s edge hundreds of bayonets wavered for a second; then dark figures leaped up, scrambled, crawled forward, rose, ran out into the sunless, pallid light. Like surf bursting along a coast a curtain of exploding shells stretched straight across the débris of what had been a meadow--a long line of livid obscurity split with flame and storms of driving sand and gravel. Shrapnel leisurely unfolded its cottony coils overhead and the iron helmets rang under the hail. Men fell forward, backward, sideways, remaining motionless, or rolling about, or rising to limp on again. There was smoke, now, and mire, and the unbroken rattle of machine guns. Ahead, men were fishing in their sacks and throwing bombs like a pack of boys stoning a snake; I caught glimpses of them furiously at work from where I knelt beside one fallen man after another, desperately busy with my own business. Bearers ran out where I was at work, not my own company but some French ambulance sections who served me as well as their own surgeons where, in a shell crater partly full of water, we found some shelter for the wounded.