#counter-attack

1945 Counter-Attack Movie Promo

We’d gained our first objective hours before

While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,

Pallid, unshaven and thirsty, blind with smoke.

Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,

With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,

And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs

High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps

And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,

Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;

And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,

Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.

And then the rain began,—the jolly old rain!

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,

Staring across the morning blear with fog;

He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;

And then, of course, they started with five-nines

Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.

Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst

Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,

While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.

He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,

Sick for escape,—loathing the strangled horror

And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

An officer came blundering down the trench:

“Stand-to and man the fire step!” On he went ...

Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step ... counter-attack!”

Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right

Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;

And stumbling figures looming out in front.

“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,

And he remembered his rifle ... rapid fire ...

And started blazing wildly ... then a bang

Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans ...

Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

Spain's twin misses bailed out , who had his strike saved by Simon with the first kick of the shootout and Italy's substitutes and coaching staff poured on to the pitch to celebrate in front of their jubilant supporters behind the goal.

Italy, who will play either in Sunday's final at Wembley in their first showpiece since being thrashed 4-0 by Spain in Euro 2012, are looking to win the tournament for the first time since 1968.

Roberto Mancini's side took the lead on the hour through a sensational curler from to complete a sweeping counter-attack which began with keeper Donnarumma catching a Spain cross and rolling the ball out.

Deadly Syrian strikes as army battles rebel counter-attack

Air raids by Syrian warplanes in the country’s restive northwest killed at least eight civilians, including two children, as troops and rebels battled for a town that has changed hands over the past two weeks.

Thursday’s air raids followed an intensification of fighting in the last rebel-held stronghold in the country after a coalition of armed groups launched a counter-offensivetwo days earlier…