generals had asked for trouble when they destroyed that redoubt,
and our men had it. Infuriated by a massacre of their garrison in the
mine-explosion and by the loss of their spear-head, the Germans kept up
a furious bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in bursts of
gun-fire which tossed our earthworks about and killed and wounded many
men. Our line at Hooge at that time was held by the King's Royal
Rifles of the 14th Division, young fellows, not far advanced in
the training-school of war. They held on under the gunning of their
positions, and each man among them wondered whether it was the shell
screeching overhead or the next which would smash him into pulp like
those bodies lying nearby in dugouts and upheaved earthworks.

On the morning of July 30th there was a strange lull of silence after a
heavy bout of shells and mortars. Men of the K. R. R. raised their heads
above broken parapets and crawled out of shell-holes and looked about.
There were many dead bodies lying around, and wounded men were wailing.
The unwounded, startled by the silence, became aware of some moisture
falling on them; thick, oily drops of liquid.

"What in hell's name--?" said a subaltern.

One man smelled his clothes, which reeked of something like paraffin.

Coming across from the German trenches were men hunched up under some
heavy weights. They were carrying cylinders with nozles like hose-pipes.
Suddenly there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from some
blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to the broken ground
where the King's Royal Rifles lay.

Some of them were set on fire, their clothes burning on them, making
them living torches, and in a second or two cinders.

It was a new horror of war--the Flammenwerfer.

Some of the men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired repeatedly at
the Germans carrying the flaming jets. Here and there the shots were
true. A man hunched under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught
in a candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the long
bombardment was too much for the rank and file, whose clothes were
smoking and whose bodies were scorched. In something like a panic they
fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay.

The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached the troops in
reserve, who had been resting in the rear after a long spell. They moved
up at once to support their comrades and make a counter-attack. The
groun