Though the West Kents thus amused themselves and put many a shy comrade who refused to sing "in the oven," there was a feeling that danger was near. Instinct proved unerring.
The Tenth Division stood to all night, so that if the enemy came in the morning they would not find their hosts unprepared. In the first trenches were the Connaughts, the Munsters, the Dublin Fusiliers, the Hampshires and the Inniskillings, the latter to a large extent Ulster men holding the extreme right wing.
Dawn had scarcely broken when the enemy made his expected attack. The conditions wholly favored him, for a fairly dense fog prevailed, and under its cover the Bulgars were able to get within 300 yards of parts of our line without being observed. The Inniskillings were the first to be attacked; about 5 A. M. their outposts were driven in and then a great mass of the enemy swooped down on the trenches, but were driven back by the fire of our Maxim guns and by the steady magazine fire that came from the trenches.
Scarcely had the attack on the extreme right of our line had time to develop when the main body of Bulgars were seen running down a defile leading to the center of our front. They were perceived as a long, interminable stretch of men—a mass of shadowy figures revealed half distinctly in the mist. As they reached the end of the defile they spread out as from a bottle neck, and with wild cheers flung themselves on our line. But before they had got so far our guns smashed and battered the thick procession of men leaping out of the narrow gorge. It was impossible to miss them. British artillery had never had such a target since the first battle of Ypres, when the guns literally mowed down the half-trained German troops who attacked on the Yser.
The slaughter of the guns was magnified by the slaughter of the rapid magazine fire at short range. Wave after wave of the enemy came on, each broken as it swept out of the defile, but the Bulgars were not to be denied. Though their comrades fell thick and fast they came on, and by sheer impetus of numbers reached our trenches, where awful work was wrought. It was hand to hand fighting then—terrible to witness, terrible to think of. The short bayonet of the Bulgar, however, was of little use in these trench combats, and man for man the British won, but the Bulgars had the numbers and temporarily the first line of the Twelfth Division was overborne. The British were driven out.
The British artillery had been doing splendid work, but by now the enemy artillery was in full blast, and they poured a devastating and withering hail of fire on our positions, which through faulty ranging put out of action more of the Bulgars than it did of us. The Munsters and the Connaughts and the Dublins quickly rallied, and with a wonderful bayonet charge drove the enemy out of their trenches again. The enemy, massed in close formation, swarmed in once more, but against the deadly fire poured into them they could make no headway for some time. The brave Irish regiments were pouring lead into them as fast as they could load their rifles. They poured into the oncoming masses as much as 175 rounds at pointblank range. This will give an idea of the slaughter that went on this December morning, as the dawn slowly beat the mists away.
II—CRIES OF HALF-MADDENED BULGARS
Mingling with the roar of the artillery and the clitter-clatter of the machine guns and the sharp snap of the rifles were the hoarse cries of the half maddened Bulgars, whose officers ever drove them on to the death that came quick and hot from the British trenches. Men of splendid physique they were that faced our hail of lead, cheering in a sort of wild euthanasia of battle, with bugles and trumpets blowing defiant challenge as in the knightly days of the tourney. They did not know, many of them, whether they were attacking French, British or Turk, but unquestioning, unthinking, they came on with a fearlessness of life deserving of a better cause, leaping into our trenches and falling back dead with a bullet in the throat or a bayonet wound in the breast or with head blown off by one of our shells.
But it was, "for all our grim resistance," a hopeless kind of struggle. Sooner or later that unceasing stream of men issuing out of the narrow defile must sweep us back. Always the enemy returned to the charge, undeterred by heavy losses, undismayed by our deadly gun and magazine fire. The line held, and to their cheers we answered with our own cheers, and to their cries we gave back answer with our own cries, and if sometimes the thin line faltered the shouts of officers and men, "Stick it, jolly boys! Give 'em hell, Connaughts!" brought new life and new strength.
In the end we gave the enemy his dearly bought line of trenches and slowly fell back to our second line of positions, where the remainder of the divison joined up and helped us to beat off the sustained attacks, which lacked naught in violence. All day the Bulgars alternately bombarded and charged us. There seemed to be thousands and thousands of them. They gave us no rest at night. Wherever we stood they rained an unceasing fusillade of shell upon us and followed each rafale up with a determined infantry attack.