We have been asked to quote more from the new books by Donald R. Burgett, following the extract from Seven Roads to Hell in the September issue of Greenhill Military Book News. The following comes from Currahee! A Screaming Eagle at Normandy: 'Get going there,' yelled the officer, looking straight at me. I was near the top, pulling myself up by roots and trying to hold my rifle at the same time. 'Don't worry joker, I'm ahead of you, so is everyone else, get your ass up here and go with us,' I told him. He stopped short, his mouth opened, then closed, then he started to climb too. Three enemy soldiers were on the ground just to my right rolling around groaning. The troopers closest to them dispatched them with bayonets. The field was fairly large and surrounded with high hedges. Short grass about two inches high grew from corner to corner. There was no trees, ditches or gulleys for cover, just flat open ground to cross to the next hedge. We all fired from the hip as we ran. Halfway across the enemy opened up on us with rifle, machine-gun, mortar and 88 shells. Our artillery, which had been pasting the hedges in front of us, lifted and started falling farther back in enemy territory. It was impossible to go back or to either side. We had to take the shortest route, straight into the enemy fire, to try and reach the safety of the hedge in front of us. The one that held the enemy. Men were being killed and wounded in large numbers, some of them horribly maimed, with limbs and parts of their bodies being shredded or shot away. I could feel the muzzle blasts of the men behind me as they fired from the hip. I was nearly as concerned about getting shot in the back by a fellow trooper as I was about the Germans in front. We kept running straight at the enemy. It was like a dream – no, more like a nightmare. We were running for all we were worth, but standing still, getting nowhere. The hedge at the far end of the field seemed as far away as before. We were being annihilated, our ranks disintegrating as we ran. Glancing at my comrades around and behind me to draw courage and strength from their presence, I saw that the field was being littered with dead, our dead. We had been yelling and screaming like animals at the top of our lungs all the way. The Germans were falling back. But the next hedge was a duplicate of the first. Each time we gained a hedge, the enemy left a delaying force and pulled back to the next one and were waiting for us when we crossed the open fields with nothing but two inches of grass for cover. I don't know how many hedges we crossed in this bayonet attack but they seemed endless. The bushes up front rustled and moved. Someone was up ahead and I didn't think it was one of our own men. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 95 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com