The ground our troops were holding on Monday, May 17, projected as two salients into the enemy's territory, one south of Richebourg-L'Avoue and the other to the north of Festubert. The purpose of the operations undertaken on Monday was to connect up the space which lay between them. In this we were successful.

At about 9:30 A.M. on Monday, May 17, our forces attacked the enemy occupying this area, from north and south, and gradually drove him from all his intrenchments within it. The Germans here, pressed on three sides, subjected to a cross-fire from several directions and to continuous bombing, reached the limits of their endurance during the morning, and over 300 surrendered.

After this area had been made good by us fighting continued throughout the day, and our troops, having joined hands, pressed the enemy still further eastward, forcing them out of one post after another. As the afternoon wore on more prisoners fell into our hands, entire groups of men giving themselves up.

The centres of the hostile resistance in this quarter were the clusters of buildings which were very strongly held and surrounded by networks of trenches dotted with numerous machine gun posts, and in front of one of the nests of works near the Ferme Cour de L'Avoue, between La Quinque Rue and Richebourg-L'Avoue, a horrible scene was witnessed by our troops during the day.

Desperate fighting was going on in front of this farm when the remains of a battalion of Saxons, which, it appears, had been hastily brought down from further north and thrown into the fight, having decided to surrender en bloc, advanced toward our line. Not knowing what the movement of this mass of men implied, our infantry poured a hail of bullets into them, whereupon the survivors, some hundreds strong, halted, threw down their rifles, and held up their hands, and one of their number waved a white rag tied to a stick.

Our guns continued to fire from the rear, and whether our infantry, who, by this time, have had some experience of the treachery of the enemy, would have paid any attention to these signals is uncertain, but the matter was taken out of their hands, for as soon as the Prussian infantry on the north of this point realized what their Saxon comrades were trying to do, they opened rapid fire from the flank, enfilading the mass. It appears also that the news of what was happening must have been telephoned back to the German artillery further east—which was also probably Prussian, since its guns suddenly opened on the Saxon infantry, and under this combined fire most of the latter were very soon accounted for.

Among the many scenes of the war there has probably been no more strange spectacle than that of the masses of gray-coated soldiers standing out in the open, hands raised, amidst the dead and dying, being butchered by their own comrades before the eyes of the British infantry. The fact that the victims of this slaughter were Saxons was a source of regret to us, since the Saxons have always proved themselves more chivalrous and less brutal than either the Prussians or the Bavarians—in fact, cleaner fighters in every way.

While we were thus pressing forward gradually on the section of front between our two original points of penetration, our troops on the right in front of Festubert were making good progress southward along the German trenches. Their attack began at 11:30 A.M., and the Germans were soon cleared out of their line in this quarter up to a point a short distance south of Festubert, where they made a strong resistance and checked our further lateral progress.

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