I salute the artillery. At ten minutes to six, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of guns behind us went off like one gun. All the inhabitants of hell seemed to have been let loose and to be screaming and raving in the sky overhead. The darkness just in front of us was rent and sundered. Blinding flashes in a long and accurate line blazed and vanished and blazed and vanished, while the guns which had at first roared in unision now drummed and bellowed and thumped and crashed in their own time. Their din was half drowned by the variegated noises of the exploding shells. No maniac ever dreamed anything like it.
Matters didn't improve. The German was not asleep, and within a minute or two his own barrage had multipled the inferno by two, while machine-guns broke out with the rattling of a thousand typewriters. I stood dazed by the din and didn't notice that our own barrage had lifted until somebody shouted, "Come on!"
War Is War by Ex-Private X