Artillery

Last night Fritz [the Germans] put on a whale of a bombardment [attack], and I don’t see how any of us escaped to tell the story. In the thick of it our communications were knocked out and I was detailed to repair the telephone line . . . Well, I thought of all the mean things I’d done in my life, breathed a little prayer, climbed out of my foxhole, and darted out . . . Flashes of exploding artillery at intervals lighted up the blackness of the night. Explosions of enemy shells on every hand and the scream of big ones going overhead to back areas added to the thunderous uproar so that I could not have heard my own voice had I dared to speak . . . I was splicing [joining] the wire when—Shriek! Bang! A ton of steel came over me.

—Corporal Elmer Sherwood, diary entry, October 30, 1918

Our gun’s crew was busy mounting the . . . gun on the parapet [walls] and bringing up extra ammunition from the dugout . . . I trained my . . . gun on their [the enemy] trench and its bullets were raking the parapet [scraping the wall]. Then over they [the Germans] came, bayonets glistening . . . they looked like some horrible nightmare. All along our trench . . . guns spoke . . . They went down in heaps, but new ones took the place of the fallen. Nothing could stop that mad rush.

—Arthur Guy Empey, Over the Top, 1917