“Funny as the devil how a man kinda knows when somethin’ big is comin’ off. But you do. Every night there’d be _beaucoup_ rockets and star-shells goin’ up. But this night there was more than _beaucoup_, if you know what that means. The way those red and different colored rockets began goin’ up made me think that a bunch of pink, yellow, and red snakes had been turned loose in heaven and was crawlin’ ’round the sky. Now and then a star-shell would go up and bust. Then you could see the trenches and No Man’s Land. But that’s all. There wasn’t a thing stirrin’. Not a sound. Almost too quiet to be safe. “Just at the beginnin’ of one o’clock a German gun boomed. Then hell broke loose all along our front. Never heard such an infernal noise in all my life. Sounded like a bunch of demons poundin’ on brass-drums with trip-hammers. _Toot sweet_ our guns began to talk back. They got us up to the pits and we started to man them crazy-looking ninety-five-millimeter stove-pipes. That’s what the cannon looked like, anyway. “Shells was whizzin’ in from every direction. High explosive cracked over our beans and rained down like hail. Rat-ta-tat! Ra-ta-tat! Bang! Bluey! Smash! That was all we could hear up and down the lines. The barrages roared away like barbarian music. Pretty soon the noise hurt my ears so till I couldn’t try to listen to orders. Just worked away like a mechanical man. “We started to fire just as a shell spilled its load near the first piece. God! the screech of them three boys that got all torn up was enough to tear a man’s ear-drums to shreds—couldn’t help but hear ’em even with the bangin’ of the guns. “All of us was too busy rammin’ shells in our piece and firin’ the thing to notice much that was goin’ on, but the flames from the burstin’ shells and the flares made it almost as bright as day ever gets to be in this country. The yellow light was kinda blindin’ as it came in spurts and jerks. I looked ahead of us, down toward the trenches and No Man’s Land. The Boche infantry was coming straight at us with fixed bayonets. I ain’t jokin’ you, boy, but there was some kind of a cold thing chasin’ up and down my old spine for a few minutes. I could almost see our doughboys strainin’ down in their trenches waitin’ to get up and at ’em. “At last they let ’em go to it. It was some smash-up when they hit them Germans. The Boches was at least five to one stronger than us and their weight counted enough to make us fall back to the streets of Seicheprey. “I speak of streets and Seicheprey as if it might have been a regular village. But it wasn’t. Seicheprey was just like a village ghost. Not a house standin’ up—everythin’ littered about. Stones, bricks, wood heaps, rubbish, barbed-wire entanglements were in the streets and every place. The fightin’ down there was all hand to hand.