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Then the time came. The watch hands pointed to the second which had
been given for the assault to begin, and instantly, to the tick, the
guns lifted and made a curtain of fire round the Chateau of Hooge,
beyond the Menin road, six hundred yards away.
"Time!"
The company officers blew their whistles, and there was a sudden
clatter from trench-spades slung to rifle-barrels, and from men
girdled with hand-grenades, as the advancing companies deployed and
made their first rush forward. The ground had been churned up by our
shells, and the trenches had been battered into shapelessness, strewn
with broken wire and heaps of loose stones and fragments of steel.
It seemed impossible that any German should be left alive in this
quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and
hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them,
and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been
trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way,
stupefied by the bombardment beneath which they had crouched.


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