A battalion of the Coldstream Guards had not yet arrived, but was about a quarter of a mile from the town, marching in. The colonel was at the head of the column with the guide. This man persisted in flashing an electric torch to and fro towards the left, and the C.O. peremptorily ordered him to put it out.
The man obeyed for a few yards, and then flashed the light again.
The C.O. at once grasped the situation, drew his revolver, and shot the spy dead.
It was as though that bullet had been fired straight into a mountain of gunpowder.
With a terrific crash German guns opened fire. Simultaneously, on front and flank, rifles and machine-guns blazed out.
A German night attack is no question of feeling a way in open order until the enemy's outposts are driven in; it comes down like a smith's hammer on the anvil.
The Coldstreamers, with miraculous discipline, swung round and got into a kind of line with the outposts already there, then continued retirement to the town at the double.
The outpost line was crushed through almost in a moment like tissue paper, and before anyone could grasp what was happening the Germans were pouring their massed columns into the town.
Thus began perhaps the most critical and certainly the most remarkable fight in which British regiments have ever been engaged.
Tired out, the men tumbled out of the houses; three privates and a corporal here, a dozen men and a sergeant there, a subaltern, a private and a machine-gun at another corner, half a dozen men at two first-floor windows somewhere else. And the only light came from the flash of the rifles.