"'Humph,' commented the doctor as he walked away. 'Guess he could stand the loss of some more jaw and not kill him. He seems to have plenty left.'"
A more sinister story was told by a trooper shot through the thigh. He said the Germans got into one of our trenches, in which they found him and nine of his comrades. Five of the ten had been hit. The Huns told the wounded to crawl away to as safe a place as they could find, and they straightway wriggled off down the trench, as directed.
With a scowl on his face a big German said to the five unwounded men, "We don't want you. Go!" He pointed his finger to the shell-swept field that led toward the British reserve line. The five started on a run, but had not gone far when the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun behind them commenced. In an instant the air was full of bullets. Four of the five men fell dead. The fifth was the man who told the story. He fell, he said, at the first sound of the quick-firer, and thus escaped with a bullet through his leg.
Counter-attack followed counter-attack as the day wore on. We launched a small one at 2.30 p.m., a larger one an hour later, and a still larger one was planned for 6 o'clock. This last was to win back the lost trenches around the Hooge Château, past the Bellewaarde Lake, and on to the north.
The British guns cleared the way splendidly for the 6 o'clock attack. "Mother" shells fell into a line of ruined houses near Hooge. The Germans had placed several machine-guns there, and as the 9·2 projectiles knocked the bricks about their ears they scampered out like chickens. A machine-gun not far away in the 9th Lancers' trenches poured a hail of bullets into the Huns as they left cover, and numbers were seen to fall.
The Royal Fusiliers were attacking, but when their line "got up," the advantage was lost, other enemy machine-guns had been brought into the German trenches, and the attack "fizzled out," no real gain having been made.
So night closed in. By 2 o'clock in the morning of the next day the fresh 2nd Cavalry Division troopers had relieved the tired men of the 1st Cavalry Division, who were once more brought back to the Vlamertinghe huts.
The Cavalry had lost heavily, and was still to lose before the second battle of Ypres was finished, though the ground won by the Huns on the 24th of May marked their furthermost westerly advance.