They flung themselves into the German lines in the wake of a heavy
barrage fire, smashing through broken belts of wire and stumbling in
and out of shell-craters. The Germans, in their front-lines, had gone
to cover in deep dugouts which they had built with feverish haste on
the Bluff and its neighborhood during the previous ten days and
nights. At first only a few men, not more than a hundred or so, could
be discovered alive. The dead were thick in the maze of trenches, and
our men stumbled across them.
The living were in a worse state than the dead, dazed by the shell-
fire, and cold with terror when our men sprang upon them in the
darkness before dawn. Small parties were collected and passed back as
prisoners--marvelously lucky men if they kept their sanity as well as
their lives after all that hell about them. Hours later, when our
battalions had stormed their way up other trenches into a salient
jutting out of the German line and beyond the boundary of the
objective that had been given to them, other living men were found to
be still hiding in the depths of other dugouts and could not be
induced to come out.
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