) Presently a body of Germans came out of a copse called Leuze
Wood, on rising ground, faced round among the thin, slashed trees of
Falfemont, and advanced toward our men, shoulder to shoulder, like a
solid bar. It was sheer suicide. I saw our men get their machineguns
into action, and the right side of the living bar frittered away, and
then the whole line fell into the scorched grass. Another line
followed. They were tall men, and did not falter as they came forward,
but it seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to death.
They died. The simile is outworn, but it was exactly as though some
invisible scythe had mown them down.
In all the letters written during those weeks of fighting and captured
by us from dead or living men there was one cry of agony and horror.
"I stood on the brink of the most terrible days of my life," wrote one
of them. "They were those of the battle of the Somme. It began with a
night attack on August 13th and 14th. The attack lasted till the
evening of the 18th, when the English wrote on our bodies in letters
of blood, 'It is all over with you.
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