r long. The bombing-parties searched and found them,
and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches
German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way, stupefied by
the bombardment beneath which they had crouched.

Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled hand-grenades, and
swept the ground before them. Some Germans screeched like pigs in a
slaughter-house.

The men went on in short rushes. They were across the Menin road now,
and were first to the crater, though other troops were advancing quickly
from the left. They went down into the crater, shouting hoarsely, and
hurling bombs at Germans, who were caught like rats in a trap, and
scurried up the steep sides beyond, firing before rolling down again,
until at least two hundred bodies lay dead at the bottom of this pit of
hell.

While some of the men dug themselves into the crater or held the dugouts
already made by the enemy, others climbed up to the ridge beyond and
with a final rush, almost winded and spent, reached the extreme limit
of their line of assault and achieved the task which had been set them.
They were mad now, not human in their senses. They saw red through
bloodshot eyes. They were beasts of prey--these decent Yorkshire lads.

Round the stables themselves three hundred Germans were bayoneted, until
not a single enemy lived on this ground, and the light of day on that
9th of August revealed a bloody and terrible scene, not decent for words
to tell. Not decent, but a shambles of human flesh which had been a
panic-stricken crowd of living men crying for mercy, with that dreadful
screech of terror from German boys who saw the white gleam of steel at
their stomachs before they were spitted. Not many of those Durham and
Yorkshire lads remain alive now with that memory. The few who do must
have thrust it out of their vision, unless at night it haunts them.

The assaulting battalion had lost many men during the assault, but their
main ordeal came after the first advance, when the German guns belched
out a large quantity of heavy shells from the direction of Hill 60. They
raked the ground, and tried to make our men yield the position they had
gained. But they would not go back or crawl away from their dead.

All through the day the bombardment continued, answered from our side
by fourteen hours of concentrated fire, which I watched from our battery
positions. In spite of the difficulties of getting up supplies
throu