From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 24

Six times they came on with much determination, and six times their waves were broken up. Some London Territorials had to repel part of the a.s.saulting waves, after a gallant struggle for their objectives, and one young officer among them earned special honour by gathering a company of men together and leading them against the advancing enemy, whom they scattered with bombs and rifles.

Most of the Germans here in this district round Wurst Farm, east of Winnipeg, were men of the 36th and 208th Divisions, and were a mixture of Prussians and Poles, who seem to have been stout-hearted fellows.

Their local reserves were quickly exhausted, and in the afternoon, when they threw in further reserves, these were broken up in the same way. A frightful fate met a German division which was brought up in the afternoon near Roulers to be hurled against the Londoners and Highlanders. Our guns broke up their columns, and when they rallied and re-formed, broke them again. Our aeroplanes flew low over them, strafing them with machine-gun fire, and at intervals gas clouded about them, so that they had to put on their masks, if they had time to put them on before they fell, and marched blindly forward to another doom, for some of those who came within range were shot down by the London men, little fellows, some of them, with the c.o.c.kney accent which makes me homesick for the Fulham Road when I hear it along the roads of Flanders, but with big, brave hearts. Three of the German battalions deployed and drove against the Highlanders at Delva Farm and Rose House, and fought so hard that they could only be driven back when the Highlanders rallied, and at eight o'clock in the evening swept them out and away. Strong counter-attacks were made between six and seven in the evening in the neighbourhood of Hill 37 and the country round Bremen Redoubt, against the King's Liverpools, where the South-African Scots held their line.

There were a great many blockhouses in this district, some of them damaged and some still intact, and in those undamaged forts little parties of men, who fired their machine-guns to the last moment before death or surrender. Hill 37 was a hard place to attack, as the Irish found it, and here Lancas.h.i.+re men fought their way up and round in spite of the waves of machine-gun bullets that swept the ground about them.

The Bremen Redoubt, which had been so costly to the Irishmen on July 31, was carried by the South-Africans in a fine a.s.sault, while Scottish troops were gaining other strong points and drawing tight nets round any blockhouse from which came any fire. Out of these places, in all that part of the line, many prisoners were taken, and they made their way down anxiously through their own sh.e.l.l-fire, which was barraging these fields. A great party of Germans, white-faced and afraid, were found in the long galleries running out of a fortified place called Schuler Farm.

South of all this the Australians were fighting in the centre of yesterday's great attack where the ground rises to the foul heights of Polygon Wood. The Australian lads were in their most perfect form. They had had some rest since the hard, bad days at Bullecourt and in the dreadful valley of Noreuil, where I went to see them outside the Quant-Drocourt line. Since then I had seen them in the harvest-fields of France, in the market squares of Flemish towns, along the dusty roads which lead up to the Front. Always I felt it good to see those easy-going fellows in their flap hats, so lithe, so clean-cut, so fresh.

It was an honour to get a salute from them now and then, for they are not great at that sort of thing, and one could see with half an eye that they have not lost any of their quality since some of them fought their great epic at h.e.l.les and Suvla Bay, and afterwards at Pozires gained and held their ground under months of great sh.e.l.l-fire, and then at Bullecourt fought with the grim endurance of men who will not yield to any kind of hammering if their pride is in the job. They are boys, many of them, and simple-looking fellows who were not cut to the model of barrack-room soldiers. They have a wildish gipsy look when one sees them camped in the fields, and free-and-easy manners in the village estaminets. When I heard they were going to attack Polygon Wood I knew that we should get it, if human courage could have the say, for the Australians are not easily denied if they set their mind on a thing, and for all their boyishness--though they have middle-aged follows among them too--they have a grim pa.s.sion in them at such times. Yet they are free-and-easy always, even on the battlefield, and a bit impatient of checks and restraints. Knowing them, and the heart and soul of them, one of their commanding officers arranged a method of preventing them from getting bored with the long strain of a two hours' wait, which was ordered when they should have gained their first objective. He sent up to them by the carrying parties bundles of the previous day's papers, all the picture papers especially, and large quant.i.ties of cigarettes.

The idea worked beautifully, and it was the strangest thing that has happened in any great battle. The Australian lads got at the papers, and on the ground which they had just captured spread them out and studied the news of the day and smoked their cigarettes with quiet enjoyment, while ahead of them rolled a stupendous barrage, with thousands of heavy sh.e.l.ls that came screaming over their heads from our guns behind them, answered by other sh.e.l.ls that came the other way, and burst farther back on the battlefield. So they were seen by one of our airmen, who was surprised by what he saw.

The going had been pretty bad before then, as I was told to-day by some of the men whom I met slightly wounded along the Menin road. The enemy seemed to smell danger in the night and put over a heavy barrage just before the attack started. It was on the tail of the Australians, and might have demoralized them if they had not been so high in heart. They got away in good order, and kept going to keep pace with the travelling storm of sh.e.l.ls which broke before them. One queer thing happened near Clapham Junction. The enemy had apparently planned a raid with "flammenwerfer," or flame-jets as we call these devilish engines, at the very time of the attack and they were met by the Australian shock of a.s.sault, and fell before it. While some of the Australians worked round Glencorse Copse and Nonne Boschen or Nuns' Wood, others fought up by Westhoek across the Hanebeek towards the post called by a curious coincidence Anzac Corner. After heavy fighting for a little while at one of the blockhouses the Australian flag was planted at Anzac Corner and waves there still. In Nonne Boschen the ground was marshy and enc.u.mbered with fallen trees, but the boys struggled through somehow, and then started for the Polygon Wood, where there is no wood, as there seldom is in these places when our artillery has done its work, but only some blasted trunks and stakes. In Glencorse Wood and round about it there were a good many Germans, and they fought hard. Fifty of them were killed in hand-to-hand fighting, or fighting at close quarters, and a blockhouse on the north-west of the wood, where the garrison would not surrender, but kept his machine-guns going, was taken by a bombing attack. So after a two hours' wait at the end of the first lap the Australians flung away their cigarettes and the a.s.saulting waves pa.s.sed on to the ridge of Polygon Wood. They could not take all the line they had been asked to take in the first attempt, and were checked on the right by machine-gun fire. So they dug in on a crescent, which had its right ear somewhere by Carlisle Farm to the north of Black Watch Corner, until supports came up to make good their losses on the way, and they were able to go forward and straighten out. After that the counter-attacks began. All of them were broken up by artillery-fire, and when one of the German divisions was flung in, the only men who reached our lines were those who tried to escape from the barrage which our guns put over their a.s.sembly position. I should like to give a fuller history than I did yesterday about the taking of Inverness Copse and the bogs of the Dumbarton Lakes, and the tangled ground of Shrewsbury Forest, but I have no time, as the wires wait, except to pay a tribute to the men who fought there over most difficult country, crowded with blockhouses, and under severe fire from the enemy's guns. Men from Surrey and Kent, from the Midlands, from Wales, from the North, the battalions of the 8th and 14th Divisions, all fought and won with equal courage and success.

SEPTEMBER 23

The enthusiasm of the troops who fought in Thursday's battle of the Menin road is good enough proof that they achieved success that morning without those great losses which take the heart out of victory. All the men I have seen are convinced that the enemy's losses are heavy. Not so much in the actual attack, where he held his blockhouse system with small garrisons, as afterwards, when he tried to counter-attack.

I have already put on record some of the attempts he made to regain ground on the afternoon of the battle. Yesterday and to-day he has continued his efforts with even more disastrous results to his unhappy troops. About midday yesterday a German regiment was sent up in motor-omnibuses to a point behind the enemy's lines to make a new a.s.sault upon our positions in Polygon Wood. The three battalions then took to the road, and were seen very quickly by our observers. The artillery made that road a way of fire, and the German soldiers were caught in it and dispersed. Odd companies of them worked their way forward by other tracks, but lost themselves in the chaos of sh.e.l.l-craters, where other heavy sh.e.l.ls burst among them. They were no longer battalions or companies, but a terror-stricken collection of individual soldiers, taking cover in holes and without guidance or command. An officer collected fifty of them and led them back to reorganize. He had no notion of what had happened to the rest of the regiment, except that it was broken and ineffective, in this wild turmoil of crater earth. He went forward again on reconnaissance, and walked into a body of Australians, who took him prisoner.

So it happened with another column at Zandvoorde. One of our aerial observers watched the long trail of men marching up the road and sent a message to the guns. They were the heavy guns which found the target with 92 sh.e.l.ls and with twelve-inchers, which are monstrous and annihilating. Down there at Zandvoorde it must have been h.e.l.l. We can only guess how many men were blown to pieces, and it is not a picture on which the imagination should care to linger. It was a b.l.o.o.d.y shambles.

Along the Menin road later in the day came another long column of marching men. They were men of the Sixteenth Bavarian Division, who had been sent up in urgent haste without knowledge of the ground, without maps, and with officers who seem to have had no definite instructions except to fling their men in an attack somehow and anyhow. Over their heads in the darkness under the stars flew a British aeroplane with a bomb of the heaviest kind. When our airman saw these hostile troops advancing, flying low like a great black bat he dropped his frightful thing on the head of the column. It burst with a deafening roar and scattered the leading company. Flying in the same sky-s.p.a.ce as the big aeroplane was a number of other night raiders of ours. They also flew low above the marching troops, and all down the road dropped their explosives. Our guns added their help, and they fired many rounds down the Menin road, bracketing the ditches. It is a dreadful thing to walk along a road which is being "bracketed," and with those birds of prey above them the Bavarians must have suffered the worst kind of horror.

They did not get near to our lines with any counter-attack.

None of these counter-attacks has reached our lines near Polygon Ridge, which is the ground most wanted by the enemy, and the nearest seems to have been yesterday afternoon, when some of the Australian boys with whom I talked to-day saw the movement of men and the glint of bayonets in a little wood on an opposite spur. They saw the movement of men for a minute of two, and after that a fury of sh.e.l.ls which fell into the wood and filled it with flame and smoke.

"I don't know how a mortal man could have lived through that," said one of these lads. "If any Fritz got out of that without being cracked he must have had the luck of Old Harry."

There were many of these Australian boys among whom I went to-day before they had cleaned themselves of the dirt of battle, and while they were still on fire with the emotion of their amazing adventure. Some of them had escaped only by enormous luck. I talked with one stretcher-bearer, a fine, big, bullet-headed fellow with an unshaven chin and a merry smile, who was astounded to find himself alive. He had spent the day and night bandaging wounded, and, with his mates, carrying them down to the dressing-station, a mile and more back. All the time he walked and worked with bursting sh.e.l.ls about him. They knocked out several of his mates, but left him untouched. They killed two or three of the wounded on his stretchers going down, but did not scratch him. They blew up dug-outs just as he had gone out of them, and trenches through which he made his way. He was buried in earth flung up by heavy sh.e.l.ls, and he fell many times into deep craters, and men dropped all round him, but to-day he still had a whole skin and a queer, lingering smile, in which there is a look of wonderment because of his escape.

An Australian officer, who was through the Dardanelles and the Somme and Bullecourt, a slim, small-sized Australian, with a delicate, clean-cut face, thoughtful and grave, with a fine light in his eyes, was helping a wounded lad on to a stretcher when a sh.e.l.l came over his head, killed the boy, but left the officer unscathed. It was this officer, this slight, delicate-looking man, who captured, with three lads, sixty men and a German battalion staff in their headquarter dug-outs below Polygon Wood.

"Where is your revolver?" he said to the captain. The German hesitated, and said: "You will shoot me if I fetch it." "I will shoot you if you don't," said the little Australian. And he meant what he said, as I could see by the set of his lips when he told me the tale. But the German captain handed over his revolver quietly, and his maps, which were very useful.

It was a wonderful scene to-day among all these Australian lads, who had just been relieved and were talking over the scenes of yesterday's history in small groups while they sc.r.a.ped off the mud and shaved before bits of broken mirror, and polished up German rifles and machine-guns and handled their souvenirs, found in the dug-outs and blockhouses. Many of them were stripped to the waist, some of them wore German caps, some of them slept like drugged men in spite of all the noise about them.

After taking the first objective they had to wait for two hours before they went on, and there were queer scenes about the blockhouses and in the felled woods. They had found the German rations, and besides the sausages and bread and gallons of cold coffee in petrol-tins, which the boys shared among themselves, quant.i.ties of long, fat, and excellent cigars. Hundreds of Australians smoked these cigars while they waited for the barrage to lift, and when they went on again hundreds of them were still puffing them as they trudged on to Polygon Wood. They had a good day. I have met some of them, who said they enjoyed it, and would not have missed it for worlds. The excitement of it all kept them going.

The battlefield was a wild pandemonium of men, and the imagination of people who have never seen war will hardly visualize such scenes, with lads laughing and smoking while others lay dead, with groups fighting and falling round blockhouses while others were eating German sausages and joking in captured emplacements, with stretcher-bearers carrying men back under heavy sh.e.l.l-fire and German prisoners dodging their own barrage-fire on their way to our lines. An Australian doctor had his arm smashed, but stayed among the boys, regardless of his own hurt. A V.C.

officer of the Dardanelles was killed as he went back wounded on a stretcher. German wounded lay crying for help, and our men rescued them.

So about Glencorse Wood and Polygon Wood human agony and the wild spirits of Australian youth, death, and the vitality of boyhood in the pa.s.sion of a great adventure were queerly mixed, and one side of this picture of war would be hopelessly untrue if it left out the other side.

One enthusiasm of the Australians was about the English soldiers who fought on their right, the Yorks.h.i.+re boys and others who went through Inverness Copse. Again and again yesterday I heard them loud in praise of the Tommies.

"By gosh, they'll do for me! They went ahead in grand style. They couldn't be stopped anyhow, though they came up against a durned lot of machine-gun fire. They were just fine."

Far north of all this, above the Zonnebeke, were the Londoners of the 58th Division and the Highlanders of the 51st Division, and, as I have already written in previous messages, they had severe fighting and had to bear the brunt of great counter-attacks. The ground in front of the London Territorials was bad and difficult--bad because it was intersected with swamps and cut up by weeks of sh.e.l.l-fire, and horribly difficult because of a ridge rising up on the left to the German strong point of Wurst Farm.

The London boys swung left in order to attack Wurst Farm, and, avoiding a frontal a.s.sault, worked left-handed all the time till they reached the ridge, and then rushed the blockhouse from the rear. The garrison was surprised and caught. They fought desperately, but the Londoners overpowered them. The surviving Germans complained bitterly, and said it was impossible to use their machine-guns on every side at once. "It is not a fair way of fighting," said a German officer, and the Londoners laughed and said, "Not half!" and "I don't think!" and other ironical words.

In a big dressing-station up there they captured two doctors and sixty men, of whom many were wounded. The German doctors said, "Have you any wounded we can help? We are not fighting men." And they made themselves useful, and were good fellows.

Down in the valley the Londoners came face to face with a party of Germans who showed fight, but the Londoners--little fellows some of them--walked through them and over dead bodies who had fallen before their rifle-fire. There was a lot of musketry both then and afterwards when the enemy counter-attacked, and they fired like sharpshooters. Down below them and almost behind them the line dropped away to the fort of Schuler Farm, where the enemy still held out. "There are a lot of Boches down there," said an officer on the brigade staff of the London Territorials. "No," said the brigade major, and then: "Yes, and, by the Lord, there's a German officer staring at me. The blighter is telling one of his men to take a pot at me. See!" The brigade major ducked down his head as a bullet flattened against the blockhouse wall.

It was an awkward situation for the Londoners, but they formed a defensive flank and sent some lads to help the troops who were attacking the position. "Domine dirige nos" is the London motto, and there were many London boys who had it in their hearts that day, and said with the dear old c.o.c.kney accent, "Gord 'elp us." That was when the German counter-attacks developed, but were smashed by gun-fire.

In all this fighting, as far as I can find, the Highland Territorials of the 51st Division upon the left had the bloodiest fighting. They gained their ground with difficulty, because a battalion of the Royal Scots was badly held up by wire and bogs and machine-gun fire at a stream called the Lekkerbolerbeek. They had to fall back, reorganize, and attack again, which they did with splendid gallantry, and held their ground only by most grim endurance, because the enemy counter-attacked them violently all day long after the objectives had been gained.

The enemy's losses were certainly appalling to him. Officers in this fighting, who have been through many of our great battles, tell me that they have never seen before so many dead as lie upon this ground. In one section of Pheasant Trench a hundred yards long there are nearly a hundred dead. Before the attack our barrage rolled forward slowly, like a devouring fire. Instantly all along the German line green lights rose as SOS signals, but as the barrage swept on, followed by the Scots, the lights went out. They rose again from the farther lines, and then those ceased as the sh.e.l.ls reached them. Only in the blockhouses and the dug-outs down by the Lekkerbolerbeek were any Germans left alive.

The blockhouses were dealt with by small parties of Highlanders, who had been in training to meet them, and went like wolves about them, firing their machine-guns and rifles through the loopholes if the garrisons would not come out. So they swept on to their final goal, which was at Rose House and the cemetery beyond Pheasant Farm. These men had some terrible hours to face. By ill-luck their left flank was utterly exposed, and hostile aeroplanes, flying very low, saw this and flew back with the news. The enemy was already developing a series of counter-attacks by his "Stosstruppen," or storm troops, of the 234th Division, which from three o'clock in the afternoon till seven o'clock that evening made repeated thrusts against the Highlanders' front, and the heaviest weight of two and a half battalions was sent forward against this flank. It was preceded by the heaviest German barrage ever seen by these Scots, who have had many experiences of barrage-fire.

Officers watching from a little distance were horrified by that monstrous belt of fire, and the garrison of Gordons seemed lost to them for ever. It was not so bad as that. Eventually this flank fell back from Rose House to Pheasant Farm Cemetery and other ground, where they were rallied by a battalion commander, one of the youngest men of his rank in the British Army, who supplied them with fresh ammunition and directed them to hold up the German infantry advancing under cover of their bombardment. In spite of their losses our men fought their way back and regained part of the ground by desperate valour. Our guns wiped out the other counter-attacks one by one, inflicting frightful losses on the enemy. They were caught most horribly as they came along the road.

Thirty machine-guns played a barrage-fire on his lines where German soldiers tried to escape across the sh.e.l.l-craters. The Highlanders used their rifles effectively, one man firing over 500 rounds. And a gun was brought into action from a Tank which had come up as far as an advanced blockhouse, in spite of the boggy ground.

There was great slaughter among the enemy that day. Since then the slaughter has gone on, for his counter-attacks have not ceased. His guns have been very active, bombarding parts of our line intensely, and in the air his scouts and raiders have been flying over our lines in the endeavour to observe and destroy our troops and batteries, flying low with great audacity, and using machine-guns as well as bombs. But we hold all the important ground gained last Thursday.

XVI

THE WAY TO Pa.s.sCHENDAELE

SEPTEMBER 26

During the past forty-eight hours there has been hard and prolonged fighting north and south of the Menin road, and in spite of formidable counter-attacks by the enemy which began early yesterday morning and still continue, our troops have made a successful advance in the neighbourhood of Zonnebeke and southward beyond the Polygon Wood racecourse, which now belongs to the Australians.

It is south of that, by Cameron House and the rivulet called the Reutelbeek, that the enemy's pressure has been greatest, and where the battalions of the 33rd and 39th Divisions on the right of the Australians, including the Queen's, have had the hardest time under incessant fire and attack since dawn yesterday, but on their right Sherwood Foresters and Rifle Brigade men, also severely tried, have swept across the Tower Hamlets Ridge in the direction of Gheluvelt.

It was fully expected that any new endeavour of ours to advance beyond the ground gained in the battle of September 20 would be met by the fiercest opposition. The capture of Polygon Wood and Westhoek seriously lessened the value of Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, which strikes northward and forms the enemy's great defensive barrier, and it was certain that in spite of the heavy losses he has already suffered in trying to get back that high ground above Inverness Copse he would bring up all his available reserves to hinder our further progress at all costs.

For two days before yesterday he made no sign of movement in his lines, and was kept quiet by the breakdown of all his previous counter-attacks, which our men repulsed with most b.l.o.o.d.y losses to the enemy, so that their divisions were shattered and demoralized. The German Command used that time to drag the broken units out of the line and to replace them or hurry up to their support the reserves who had been waiting in the rest areas behind. These men were rushed up by motor-omnibus and railways to points where it was necessary to take to the roads and march to the a.s.sembly positions ready for immediate counter-attacks. Those were in the Zandvoorde and Kruiseik neighbourhood, south-east of Gheluvelt, ready to strike up to the Tower Hamlets Ridge while others could be a.s.sembled behind the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge.

No doubt our attack for this morning did not leave out of account the strength of resistance likely to be offered. The enemy showed signs of desperate anxiety to check us on the Polygon Wood line, and the ground going south of it to the Gheluvelt Spur, and he made a great effort by ma.s.sed artillery to smash up the organization behind our lines, and by a series of thrusts to break our front. On Monday afternoon, increasing to great intensity yesterday, he flung down his barrage-fire in Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, fired large numbers of heavy long-range sh.e.l.ls over Westhoek Ridge, Observatory Ridge, Hooge, and other old spots of ill-fame, and concentrated most fiercely on the ground about Cameron House, Black Watch Corner, and the Tower Hamlets.

At six o'clock yesterday morning, supported by this terrific fire, he launched his first attack on the Surreys, Scottish Rifles, Middles.e.x Regiment, and other troops around the Tower Hamlets, and owing to their losses they were obliged to fall back some little way in order to reorganize for an a.s.sault to recapture their position. These fought through some awful hours, and several of their units did heroic things to safeguard their lines, which for a time were threatened.

While they were fighting in this way the 4th and 5th Australians, on the high ground this side of Polygon Wood racecourse and the mound which is called the b.u.t.te, also had to repel some fierce attacks which opened on them shortly after eight o'clock in the morning. The enemy was unable to pierce their line, and fell back from this first attempt with great losses in dead and wounded. It was followed by a second thrust at midday and met the same fate. At two o'clock in the afternoon the Australians sent some of their men to help the Surreys and the English troops on their right, who were pa.s.sing through a greater ordeal owing to the storm of fire over them and the continued pressure of the enemy's storm troops, who were persistent through the afternoon in spite of the trails of dead left in their tracks. It was a serious anxiety on the eve of a new battle, but it failed to frustrate our attack. All the area through which the enemy was trying to bring up his troops was made hideous by artillery-fire and the work of the Royal Flying Corps.

It was a clear moonlight night, with hardly a breath of air blowing, and all the countryside was made visible by the moon's rays, which silvered the roofs of all the villages and made every road like a white tape. Our planes went out over the enemy's lines laden with bombs, and patrolled up and down the tracks and made some thirty attacks upon the German transport and his marching columns. All his lines of approach were kept under continual fire by our guns of heavy calibre, and for miles around sh.e.l.ls swept the points which marching men would have to pa.s.s, so that their way was h.e.l.lish. Our aircraft went out and flew very low, and dropped bombs wherever they saw men moving through the luminous mists of the night. Behind our own lines air patrols guarded the countryside.

They carried lights, and as they flew in the starlit sky they themselves looked like shooting stars until they dropped low, when their planes were diaphanous as b.u.t.terfly's wings in sunlight. On the battlefield then was no unusual gun-fire for several hours after dark. Guns on both sides kept up the usual night bombardment in slow sullen strokes, but at least on the Australian front it was not until about 4.45 in the morning that the enemy opened a heavy barrage in Glencorse Wood. The Australian troops were already ma.s.sed beyond that ground for the attack which was shortly due. On the north, up by Wurst Farm, on the lower slopes of the Gravenstafel, our London Territorials were also waiting to go "over the bags," as they call it. Against them the German guns put over a heavy barrage, but that line of explosives failed to stop or check the a.s.sault.

It was almost dark when our London lads went forward through a thick ground mist, which was wet and clammy about them. Our artillery had opened before them the same monstrous line of barrage-fire which they had followed on the 20th. and they went after it at a slow trudge, which gave them time to avoid sh.e.l.l-craters and get over difficult ground without lagging behind that protecting storm. That violence of fire was as deadly and terrifying this morning as on that other day. Through the mist our men saw the Germans running and falling, and many of them did not stay in the blockhouses, though it was almost certain death to come out into the open before the barrage pa.s.sed. There were dead men in many sh.e.l.l-craters before our men reached them, and others afterwards, as they pa.s.sed through clumps of ruin which had once been hamlets and farms. There was such a mess of brickwork and masonry at Aviatik Farm, where Germans hiding in concrete walls fired machine-guns and rifles for a time until the British troops closed on them.

Something like 150 prisoners were taken in this section of the attack, and one of them was a queer bird who belonged to the sea. That is to say, he had been a sailor on the _Dresden_ and was in the battle of Falkland Island and off Coronel, where he was picked up by a Swedish boat and taken back to Germany. To his disgust he was put in the 10th Ersatz Division, and now, after his soldier life, wants to work in a British s.h.i.+pyard. He was surprised at the food given to him, and thought it was a bribe to get information from him, believing that England is agonizing with hunger.

About a hundred and fifty prisoners were taken also, by the troops on the right of this section, belonging mostly to the 23rd Reserve Division, with some of the 3rd Guards. Our men who attacked in the direction of Zonnebeke village were Leicesters, Notts and Derbys, East Yorks, Royal Scots, Gordons, and King's Own, and they had some stiff fighting on the way to the Windmill Cabaret and Hill Forty, which seems to be the key to the position. Here they came against some of the blockhouses at Toronto Farm and Van Isackere Farm, but did not meet great trouble there. Some of them had been so badly knocked by sh.e.l.l-fire that the garrisons inside were killed, by concussion, and from others men came out to surrender as soon as our men were near them.

Near the village of Zonnebeke the fight was more serious against the Royal Scots and East Yorks, and the enemy's gun-fire, which had not been very heavy on the other ground of attack, smashed along the line of the railway embankment.