Miles of artillery

It was quite a little ways before we actually ran into rifle and machine gun fire. I don’t know how far it would be exactly, but oh, several hundred yards I would say - back of the canal there. They had a line of trenches, of course. There was a line of trench right along the top of the canal but apparently that was abandoned. They had quite a barbed wire entanglement just back of that again and then on the other side of the barbed wire entanglement, of course, they had a line of trenches but (inaudible). But, this barrage of ours, like I say, if you were unfortunate enough to run into anybody when we came up out over the canal, we had casualties. But apart from that it was really a terrific barrage. I think the heaviest barrage I ever saw there. In fact, it was. I know that. And by the time we got to these trenches, we had pretty well wrecked them all. There wasn’t really too much opposition. There was some around but not too much. It had just tore up that wire entanglement and pretty well wrecked these trenches. The night before that when we were coming up the line to get into position to jump off, I never saw so much artillery massed in my life. There always was a lot of it massed wherever there was going to be a push. But not too far behind our jumping off point, they had these eighteen pounders. That’s the lightest artillery. They were practically wheel to wheel for miles. Just gaps left where you could go through, you know. Otherwise, they were wheel to wheel. And, of course, further back behind them, the bigger guns too, several, they weren’t so thick. We had a tremendous barrage, just, well, like I say it’s just really annihilated those trenches alright.