The giant guns miles away beyond the distant hills toward Southampton began to roar. Their first shells fell short from five to six hundred yards.
Our boys gazed over their earthworks and watched the geysers of earth and stone and smoke leap into the heavens and sink back in dull crashes. The wind brought in the acid fumes of the poisonous gases.
They stood in silence, clutching their rifles and waiting for the word to fire.
The vultures circled again and dropped more smoke balls. The invisible gunners at their places caught the singsong call from the tower, touched a wheel and raised the noses of their gray monsters the slightest bit.
Again the earth trembled. The air vibrated with the rush of projectiles like the singing of telegraph wires far above the heads of the listening men.
They struck within a hundred yards of where Vassar sat with the field telephone at his ear awaiting General Hood’s orders--a giant shell landed squarely in our trenches, tore a cavern in the earth sixteen feet deep, hurling our mangled men in every direction. Within a radius of a hundred feet no living thing could be seen when the smoke and dust had cleared. Those who had not been killed by stone and flying fragments of iron had been smothered to death where they stood by the deadly fumes.
Our guns answered now in deep thunder peals that shook the trenches.
For two hours without a pause the artillery of both armies sent their mighty chorus crashing into the heavens, their missiles of death whistling through the skies.
The fire of the enemy was incredibly accurate. Their shells struck our trenches with unerring certainty--and where one struck there was nothing left but an ugly crater in the ground. They simply annihilated every object in their track and left a mass of blackened dust and pulp.
Gun after gun of our batteries were silenced.
The vultures were still soaring aloft calling the range of each concealed battery as the fight revealed its place.
The battle had opened at dawn. By ten o’clock fifty pieces of our artillery had been reduced to junk and one-third of our trenches pulverized into shapeless masses of dust, broken stone and gaping caverns.
Apparently our heavy gun fire had made no impression on the enemy. Their long range pieces were hurling death with a steady clock-like regularity that was appalling. Our army was being ground to dust without a chance to strike their hidden foe. We had never possessed an aviation corps of any serviceable strength. The year before the nucleus of one had been authorized by Congress. This little group of efficient men had followed the fleet into the Pacific and the remaining dozen had been left to die in our tragic meeting with the armada.