This was related by a sergeant of the York and Lancaster Regiment: "Every soldier knows that the first experience of being under fire is terribly unnerving, and the best of men will admit that at times they are tempted to run away. There was a young lad of the Worcestershire Regiment who had this feeling very badly, but he made up his mind that he would conquer it, and this is what he did. He made it a practice to go out of the trench and expose himself to German fire for a bit every day. The poor boy trembled like a leaf, but his soul was bigger than the weak little body holding it, and he went through the terrible ordeal for a week. On the eighth day he was fatally hit. His last words to me were, 'They can't say I was a coward, can they?'" On one occasion a subaltern of the Munsters was so little afraid of a fight with the Germans that his only fear was that they would not come on. The regiment was waiting for a night attack, and waited in vain. Hour after hour passed. The men in the trenches who had been warm with excitement began to feel cold again. Yet still no Germans came. At last the subaltern, who had been walking incessantly up and down behind the trenches like a caged lion, could stand it no longer. He glanced anxiously for the twenty-fifth time at his wrist watch and muttered, "I do hope nothing has happened to them!" A young soldier wrote: "In the first action I went silly and cried for mother ten times, but all of a sudden courage loomed up in me. I thought I could not have enough nerve to stick a man with a bayonet, but during a charge one goes mad." Much courage is needed to charge with a bayonet, or to face a bayonet charge. Young soldiers sometimes get a sinking sensation when the order to charge is given. It is horrid putting a bayonet into a man, and it is sometimes difficult to get it out of him. "It was his life or mine," said a soldier describing his first battle, "and I ran the bayonet through him. In war mercy is only for the merciful. It is awful killing big, fine men who have done us no harm; but we do it or they will do it to us." Private G. Glew, of the Coldstream Guards, wrote: "Once I had my bayonet in a German's shoulder, and could not get it out sharp enough to keep an eye on the German that was behind me with his bayonet ready for me, when the captain drew his revolver and shot him, saving my life." Soldiers do not like to talk about what they feel during a battle, but one man did tell a newspaper interviewer that "the sensation of killing a man is not nice. Once done, however, your blood grows hot, and you seem to see all red. A passion unknown in other moments possesses you. The more of your chums you see knocked down, the madder you seem to fight. One gets a kind of bloodthirsty feeling which it is impossible to quell."