the barbed wire now, trampling down the cruel strands, never heeding the bleeding wounds it tore in them, never heeding the storm of bullets, minding not the burst of shrapnel or high explosive. On and on they went, yelling and shouting; maddened with righteous anger against a ruthless foe. Forward once more. Somehow, though how they did it they never knew, Ned, Bob, and Jerry stuck close to one another. Since the death of the Southerner the three chums were in line together, and stormed on. Their rifles were hot in their hands, but still they fired. "The first-line trenches!" yelled Ned, as he pointed through the smoke. And there, indeed, they were. They had passed over No Man's Land through a storm of death which held many back. They had mastered the barrier of the wire, and now were at the first line of the German defense. And so fierce and terrible had been the rush of the Americans the Germans had fallen back, so that, save for lifeless gray bodies, the trenches were unoccupied."Forward! Forward! Don't stop! Go on!" yelled the officers. A certain objective had been set, and the commanders were fearful lest the troops, thinking that to capture the first German trenches was enough, would stop there. But they need not have been apprehensive. The boys of Uncle Sam were not of that sort. They wanted to come in closer contact with the Boches. And they did.

On over the first-line trenches they rushed, but now the fighting became hotter, for they were in the midst of machine-gun nests, placed there for just such a contingency. Death was on every side now--horrible death. A bullet clipped Jerry's ear, but he only laughed--half madly and unconsciously, no doubt--and rushed on. A man was killed in front of him, and, falling forward, tripped the tall lad, so that, for one terrible instant Bob and Ned thought their chum had been killed. But Jerry sprang up again, and, seeing a knot of Germans just ahead of him, tossed a hand grenade among them. As a wisp of fog shuts out a view, so the smoke of the grenade hid the group of Huns for a moment. And when a swirl of the air lifted the smoke curtain, a gray heap on the ground was all that remained. It was like some vision of the night, constantly changing.

On and on they rushed, shouting and shooting, yelling and being yelled at. They panted for breath, their tongues clove to their dry mouths, they suffered horribly for water, but there was only blood about them. Forward they surged. So great was the first rush that they fairly were carried—it did not seem that they took themselves—beyond the last of that particular line of German trenches. Now they were actually on the open ground beyond—the space where the Huns had their reserves, and these 

 Prev. P 70/143 next