estimated in appalling numbers.

TRAGIC TALE OF A GERMAN PRISONER

A typical description of some of the horrors of the battle, as it surged
around Contalmaison, was given by a German prisoner on July 12 to the
war correspondent of the London Chronicle. He spoke English, having been
employed in London for some years prior to the war. With his regiment,
the 122nd Bavarians, he went into Contalmaison five days before his
capture. Soon the rations they took with them were exhausted, and owing
to the ceaseless gunfire they were unable to get fresh supplies. They
suffered agonies of thirst and the numbers of their dead and wounded
increased day after day.

"There was a hole in the ground," said the German prisoner, whose head
was bound with a bloody bandage and who was still dazed and troubled
when the correspondent talked with him. "It was a dark hole which held
twenty men, all lying in a heap together, and that was the only dugout
for my company, so there was not room for more than a few. It was
necessary to take turns in this shelter while outside the English shells
were coming and bursting everywhere. Two or three men were dragged out
to make room for two or three others, then those who went outside were
killed or wounded.

"There was only one doctor, an unter officer,"--he pointed to a man who
lay asleep on the ground face downward--"and he bandaged some of us till
he had no more bandages; then last night we knew the end was coming.
Your guns began to fire altogether, the dreadful _trommelfeuer_, as we
call it, and the shells burst and smashed up the earth about us. "We
stayed down in the hole, waiting for the end. Then we heard your
soldiers shouting. Presently two of them came down into our hole. They
were two boys and had their pockets full of bombs; they had bombs in
their hands also, and they seemed to wonder whether they should kill us,
but we were all wounded--nearly all--and we cried 'Kamerade!' and now we
are prisoners."

Other prisoners said in effect that the fire was terrible in
Contalmaison and at least half their men holding it were killed or
wounded, so that when the British entered they walked over the bodies of
the dead. The men who escaped were in a pitiful condition. "They lay on
the ground utterly exhausted, most of them, and, what was strange, with
their faces to the earth. Perhaps it was to blot out the vision of the
things they had seen."

Meanwhile, despite the threatening character of th