There were some two hundred and sixty of us who finally came out from behind the trees to make the effort to carry the hill. A great burst of fire greeted us. But it didn’t stop us. We went up the knoll, scrambling for a foot-hold, digging footholds for ourselves with trench knives and trench tools. Yet the way was steep and we came reeling down again in a swish of bullets and great, choking showers of earth. Six times we tried to take that little hill. Small reinforcements heartened us in the last two attempts. It was a splendid struggle by stout-hearted men.
But at last the orders came for us to move back and again our heavy batteries began to smash at the hill in the hope of bringing the forts to destruction, the enemy into confusion and to thus give us something like a good chance at the foe. This attempt went on for half an hour. While the artillery did some damage yet when its attack ended the Germans were still there among the little, sunken concrete forts on the hill crest with a force of infantry below in the hollow ground.
We began all over again the bitter, bloody struggle. Out we advanced from the shelter of the woods to endure the fiery abomination. And this time we “got there”! Even now I do not know just how we gained success where before we had failed.
There was the enemy still on the slope, still protected in his concrete forts and with machine guns and bombs at hand. And the snipers were working with sickening accuracy from tree tops and ground concealments, potting us through clearances in the foliage especially prepared to make us their open targets.
But our boys worked their way forward with a wonderful sort of deliberateness, fighting their way upward on the knoll in small packs. In some marvelous fashion enough of us survived—I think we must have numbered five to six hundred in this final successful attack—to swarm about the German block-houses, smash our way inside, strike, kill and finally so terrorize the Bavarian defenders that they completely surrendered. In the larger block-houses there were companies of about forty men. In the smaller, groups numbering about fifteen. From these garrisons we took some four hundred prisoners.
The prisoners told us that they had deemed the attacking force a much larger one than it really was, but they had not dared retreat—had stuck and fought so desperately because they were ordered to defend the position to the death and feared to retire to the main body because of the punishment they felt sure would be meted out to them there.
There were other features of that advance through Delville woods than the final, ghastly drive up the armed hill. Deadly perils they were and which we continued to run into in the four days following as we grimly, under frightful shell fire and many counter attacks, held on to the ridge. Escaping the barbed-wire entanglements, there were the dangers of hidden pits dug by the Germans. At the bottom of these pits were bayonets rooted so that their points came uppermost and as we marched along we would go plunging head foremost into these pits, falling on the points of the bayonets. Under other camouflage of foliage were concealed the deadliest mines. Did you step lightly on them or stub them with your toe, they would blow you to pieces. Rifles were cunningly wrought into the barbed-wire entanglements in a manner to be unseen. Contact with the wire electrically set the rifles blazing at you from all angles with almost the certainty of their bullets killing at least one or two of the wire-cutters.
It wasn’t to be supposed that the Germans were going to let us sit peacefully down to our tea and jam in our hard-won concrete forts. We had no sooner got the wounded started on their way to the field hospitals, and sent the surly four hundred prisoners trudging back to our main lines under guard, than the first counter attack was made. We drove it off. They tried three times again that day, but were smashed back every time. They kept us hopping all the time—nearly every hour for the four days we held the ridge—under their shell fire, but their artillery did not do much more execution to the position than had our own.
When they couldn’t get us out that way, they tried gas. This was the worst horror, for many of our boys in the advance through the woods had lost their gas helmets. These had been torn away from their equipment by tall bushes or the low-hanging branches of trees. It is horrible enough to see a man struck down by bullet or shrapnel or bombed to pieces. But the gas victim is most piteously horrible of all. Only too many of our boys got this gas and it was harrowing to see them writhing in agony, their bodies swelling, their faces turning blue, their eyes becoming flaming red, bulging from the sockets, blood gushing from their noses and mouths. It was even more awful to hear their stuttered pleadings to their comrades to end their misery for them with a bullet or knife.
I heard one of my poor men say: