When they prepare for an assault the first line of trenches is filled with men. At the command they climb over the side and charge. Some run faster than others. This makes the onrushing edge of the mass of men thinner than the main body and irregular. It is like the tumbling crest of a white cap. As these men charge the trenches are filled again. As soon as they are ready the second crowd starts over. Then the third, and the fourth and so on. There is no attempt to take cover, because there is no cover. It is a rush to get there. There is no regular formation. The trench spews forth a swarm of fighting demons and they come trampling and yelling across that terrible strip of earth as fast as they can come. After our artillery annihilated the attack it began to shell their trenches. We knew that we would make a counter attack. Some of us may have slept that night. I didn't. Early in the morning, when it was very cold and the impassive stars blinked dimly and more dimly, the "taraffia" was passed down the line. This is chiefly rum, and it makes one feel, "Why wait any longer? Let's get up and at them now." If it wasn't for this I think we would go crazy in those last twenty minutes before the attack. Our artillery ceased. "_En avant, mes enfants! On les aura!_" shouted the officers. The first company mounted the side of the trench and dashed forward. Most of them were dangling in the barbed wire as we rushed past. The earth in front of us seemed to be whipped into a seething mass. They were sweeping low with their machine guns so as to hit us in the legs and drop us. With a shot through the stomach we might go on for minutes and maybe kill a Prussian before we died. But a hit in the legs drops a man and the artillery can blow him to pieces later, when the assault has been repulsed. It is a scientific war. A few of the first company reached the Prussian trenches before us. We clubbed and stabbed and slashed with the long knives they had given to us. The legion does not take any prisoners, because legionnaires are not taken prisoners. The Boches feel that we have no business in the war. The trench was so narrow I could not use my bayonet, so I used the knife. I do not know how long we had been fighting, but the Boches cleared out. We tried to get our squads together and prepare for what we knew would be coming. The enemy simply had retired to their second-line trenches to let their artillery turn upon us in their first-line shelter. All morning they hammered us, but we hung on, lying flat upon our bellies and clinging to our mother, the earth, as if she would protect us. Showers of dirt almost buried us alive. Sometimes bits of metal found a soft billet, and there was one fewer of us to withstand the attack that would come as surely as death awaits us all.