All day we were a sort of crossroads for shells and bullets.  All day guns roared in a complete circle around us.  About three-eighths of that circle was German, and five-eighths of it was American.  Our guns were blasting the Hun’s hill position ahead of us, and the Germans were blasting our gun positions behind us.  Shells roared over us from every point of the compass.  I don't believe there was a whole minute in fourteen hours of daylight when the air above us was silent.

The guns themselves were close enough to be brutal in their noise, and between shots the air above us was filled with the intermixed rustle and whine of traveling shells.  A man can't see a shell, unless he's standing near the gun when it is fired, but its rush through the air makes such a loud sound that it seems impossible it can't be seen.  Some shells whine loudly throughout their flight.  Others make only a toneless rustle.  It's an indescribable sound.  The nearest I can come to it is the sound of jerking a stick through water.

Some apparently defective shells got out of shape and made queer noises.  I remember one that sounded like a locomotive puffing hard at about forty miles an hour.  Another one made a rhythmic knocking sound as if turning end over end.  We all had to laugh when it went over.

They say a man never hears the shell that hits him.  Fortunately I don't know about that, but I do know that the closer they hit the less time there is to hear them.  Those landing within a hundred yards are heard only about a second before they hit.  The sound produces a special kind of horror that is something more than mere fright.  It is a confused form of acute desperation.

Each time it seemed certain that was the one.  Ducking was instinctive.  Whether I shut my eyes or not I don't know, but I do know I became so weak that my joints felt all gone.  It took about ten minutes to get back to normal.

Shells that came too close made veterans jump just the same as neophytes.  Once we heard three shells in the air at the same time, all headed for us.  It wasn't possible for me to get three times as weak as usual, but after they had all crashed safely a hundred yards away I knew I would have had to grunt and strain mightily to lift a soda cracker.

Sometimes the enemy fire quieted down and we thought the Germans were pulling back, until suddenly we were rudely awakened by a heinous bedlam of screaming shells, mortar bursts, and even machine-gun bullets.

Things had died down late one afternoon, and the enemy was said to be several hills back.  I was wandering around among some soldiers who were sitting and standing outside their foxholes during the lull.  Somebody told me about a new man who had had a miraculous escape, so I walked around till I found him.

He was Private Malcolm Harblin, of Peru, New York, a 24-year-old farmer who had been in the army only since June of '42.  Harblin was a small, pale fellow, quiet as a mouse.  He wore silver-rimmed glasses, his steel helmet was too big for him, and he looked incongruous on a battlefield.  But he was all right in his very first battle, back at El Guettar—an 88-millimeter shell hit right beside him, and a big fragment went between his left arm and his chest, tearing his jacket, shirt and undershirt all to pieces.  He wasn't even scratched.

He still wore that ragged uniform, for it was all he had.  He showed me the holes, and we were talking along nice and peaceful-like when all of a sudden there came that noise and, boy, it had all the tags on it.

Harblin dived into his foxhole and I was right on top of him.  Sometimes a man didn't hear a shell soon enough, and in that case we would have been too late, except that it was a dud.  It hit the ground about thirty feet ahead of us, bounced past us so close we could almost have grabbed it, and finally wound up less than a hundred yards behind us.

Harblin looked at me, and I looked at Harblin.  I just had strength enough to whisper bitterly at him, "You and your narrow escapes!"

I lived, of course, just as the men did.  Our home was on the ground.  We sat, ate, and slept on the ground.  We were in a different place almost every night, for we were constantly moving forward from hill to hill.  Establishing a new bivouac consisted of nothing more than digging new foxholes.  We seldom took off our clothes, not even our shoes.  Nobody had more than one blanket, and many men had none at all.  For three nights I slept on the ground with nothing under or over me.  Finally I got one blanket and my shelter-halves sent up.