An incident showing how a company of British soldiers were cut down by an ambushed enemy. The front rank of Germans had been firing from behind a small ridge. In apparent surrender they stood up in a long row and held up the white flag. The British advanced to receive their guns and take them prisoners, when suddenly the entire line fell down and a second line arose from behind the ridge and immediately killed all the British company. (Sphere copr.)
Terrible Effect of a German Shell on Wounded British Soldiers.
A party of wounded Highlanders were resting in a house on the bank of the Aisne River, where a doctor was attending them. A German shell came through the window and the soldiers resting on the sofas and on the floor were nearly all killed by flying fragments of shell. (Sphere copr.)
OFFICER FELL AT HEAD OF TROOPS
“It did not seem that any human being could live in the shower of shot and shell which began to play upon the advancing troops. They suffered terrible casualties. For a short time every man seemed to fall, but the attack was pressed even closer and closer. The fourth Canadian battalion at one moment came under a particularly withering fire. For a moment, not more, it wavered. Its most gallant commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Birchall, carrying, after an old fashion, a light cane, coolly and cheerfully rallied his men, and at the very moment when his example had infected them fell dead at the head of his battalion.
“With a hoarse cry of anger they sprang forward (for, indeed, they loved him) as if to avenge his death. The astonishing attack which followed, pushed home in the face of direct frontal fire, made in broad daylight by battalions whose names should live forever in the memories of soldiers, was carried to the first line of German trenches. After a hand-to-hand struggle the last German who resisted was bayoneted, and the trench was won.
“The measure of this success may be taken when it is pointed out that this trench represented in the German advance the apex in the breach which the enemy had made in the original line of the allies, and that it was two and a half miles south of that line. This charge, made by men who looked death indifferently in the face, for no man who took part in it could think that he was likely to live, saved the Canadian left. But it did more; up to the point where the assailants conquered or died, it secured and maintained during the most critical moment of all the integrity of the allied line. For the trench was not only taken, it was thereafter held against all comers, and in the teeth of every conceivable projectile, until the night of Sunday, the 25th, when all that remained of the war-broken but victorious battalions was relieved by fresh troops.