It would be absurd to say that we were not frightened. Thinking men could not help but be afraid. If we were pallid--which undoubtedly we were--the black upon our faces hid it, but our fear-struck voices were not disguised. They trembled and our teeth chattered. We sneaked out, single file, making our way from shell-hole to shell-hole, nearly all the time on all fours, crawling quickly over the flat places between holes. The Germans had not sighted us, but they were squirting machine-gun bullets all over the place like a man watering a lawn with a garden hose, and they were bound to get some of us. Behind me, I heard cries of pain, and groans, but this made little impression on my benumbed intelligence. From the mere fact that whatever had happened had happened to one of the other sections of ten and not to my own, it seemed, some way or another, no affair to concern me. Then a man in front of me doubled up suddenly and rolled into a shell-hole. That simply made me remember very clearly that I was not to stop on account of it. It was some one else’s business to pick that man up. Next, according to the queer psychology of battle, I began to lose my sensation of fear and nervousness. After I saw a second man go down, I gave my attention principally to a consideration of the irregularities of the German parapet ahead of us, picking out the spot where we were to enter the trench. It seems silly to say it, but I seemed to get some sort of satisfaction out of the realization that we had lost the percentage which we might be expected to lose, going over. Now, it seemed, the rest of us were safe until we should reach the next phase of our undertaking. 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, sand-bag 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 dug-outs. But we knew pretty well where every dug-out 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 round a ditch angle, with a bomb in my hand. They had their hands up and each of them yelled: “Mercy, Kamarad!”