New Britain herald., 1918-09-14
OVER THE TOP WITH
 ONLY THE BAYONETS
Local Soldier Writes of Daring Of
 One American Regiment

Howard ". Woods, son of MT. and Mrs. William Woods of 474 Stanley street serving with d regiment of engl- neers in the American EXpeditionary forces, has written to his parents of the great Franco-AmeriCan offensive, a part of which description is here With printed:
 We were working on an excavation trench about three kilometers behind the lines for two days before the sur prise attack delivered by the Amerl- cans was started. We went out on Wednesday, morning and after a hike of five kilometers went to work. We had not been working more than a couple of hours when we received or ders to return to our billets, At g o'clock that night the order came to fall in. Our commanding officer, a new one. told us we were going into our first scrap sometime that night or the following morning. Now if there were many in the outfit like me they did some thinking, I'll tell you. However, as we marched out I came back to normal and could laugh and jest with the rest without forcing it at all. We had gone scarcely three-Quarters of a mile when it began to rain. It was al- most a cloudburst, with the intense darkness only broken by the blinding flashes of lightning and the flashes ot the guns f1aring in the trenches. We marched to where we had been pre- viousIy working and threw off our packs to rest. We stayed there until early morning, when we had a hot breakfast from our rolling kitchen, and started on the march again. We had been sitting there only a few min- utes when all around us guns began to bark at the same time.
 Talk about the russh and roar of shells! It was continuous, now one gun. now two or three all at once. I certainly felt sorry for those poor Ger mans that were on the receiving end. When We started out again we marched through the first place in France that have seen in ruins. And that was not ruined so badly as some that I was to see later.
 Sees Boys Go Over the Top.
 We finally came to a hill about as high as the Kelsey street hill but great deal sleeper. Just below the top of the hill the French had dug little recesses into the ground large enough to hold one man. That was their front line trench and we got there just In time to See them go over the top. Right in front of us was a couple of companies of a machine gun bat talion awaiting their turn to go over. They were part of our division. We continued our march aong the base of the hill, with the guns still keeping up their music. Looking off in the dis tance, on the crest of a hill, we could see the troops going over the top. Wave after wave went across our line of vision until they seemed to merge into one mass of men. The first couple of waves thinned out a trif1e, but the rest didn't seem to be affected by the shells at all We were strung out along the road when the shells began coming over. First one would drop short of the road. Then another would overshoot it. I kept ducking every time I heard the whistle. It was of course a silly thing to do but I couldn't help it then, though I got over it later. Luckily none of these shells found their mark or we would have been missing quite a few members of the regiment. At this point we saw our first prisoners. Two of them came down the hill and gave themselves up to a Frenchman who was there direct ing the Americans where to go. When they passed us they were stepping high and free, glad to get out of it, I sup pose.
 We waited down on that road for