If the answer came (let us say) “Six,” we would throw three bombs into the dug-out and call:
“Here—share these among you.”
All my bombers had instructions to do the same.
We didn’t hold that trench very long. I don’t think it was more than an hour. Information regarding the attack had been sent back to the German artillery and the two trenches we had captured were sent heaving into the air. My men were slaughtered all around me. But their sacrifice was not in vain because I had been able to judge and estimate for the information of my commanders the lay-out and strength of that particular position. I had sent a messenger back with my report and rough sketches. I hoped to hold the trench until reinforcements might come at dawn. But it was useless for the rest of us (I was afterward to find out that only twenty-five were left of my original eighty) to remain in the face of certain death.
I ordered a retreat. German star-shells were making day out of night in No Man’s Land so we got together and dug in about one hundred and fifty feet from the trench whence we had fled. We camouflaged ourselves with corpses only too readily at hand.
I sent back another messenger and secured reinforcements of three machine-gun companies and two hundred men. I hated the idea of giving up those two trenches.
When daylight came, we were given another German “treat.” Above the wreck of the skyline trench bayonets stuck up and on them were the severed heads, with horrible smiles under their English caps, of twenty of my men.
When we saw that we all of us went into a blind rage. We swept across a narrow strip and charged the Germans right and left. They hate the bayonet. They will march shoulder to shoulder with astounding doggedness against the most withering fire. But the cold steel is not for Hans.
We drove them out in less than ten minutes. But they had other “things” to show us in those trenches as to the treatment put upon our men. We found four of our boys crucified to the doors of dug-outs and we found others of our dead whose corpses had been horribly and obscenely outraged.
I never heard of a German after that who got any mercy from the Oxfords and Bucks.