CHAPTER EIGHT
When at last the attack began, two hours before dawn, Franz’s first sensation was of being hurled personally from a gigantic cannon into a bottomless sea. On the way down he plunged gasping through layers of water that changed swiftly from geyser heat to the iciest cold. He had been prepared for something big, but for nothing half so big as this. The battles in Normandy, vast and in the end at Falaise terrible almost beyond enduring, offered no true basis of comparison. For him their beginning had been the small convoy raids of the Jaybos on the march to the beaches. The true battles had gone on and on endlessly and in growing terror and cruelty for almost eleven weeks, but their growth had been gradual. Here, although he could not know the precise number, almost two thousan
