e Robin Hoods and the men of Lincoln and Leicestershire were sustained
in that shambles by the spirit that had come to them through the old
yeoman stock in which their traditions were rooted, and those who had
not fallen went forward, past their wounded comrades, past these poor,
bloody, moaning men, to the German trenches behind the redoubt.

At 2.15 P.M. some Monmouth men came up in support, and while their
bombers were at work some of the Lincolns pushed up with a machine-gun
to a point within sixty yards from the Fosse trench, where they stayed
till dark, and then were forced to fall back.

At this time parties of bombers were trying to force their way up
the Little Willie trench on the extreme left of the redoubt, and here
ghastly fighting took place. Some of the Leicesters made a dash three
hundred yards up the trench, but were beaten back by overpowering
numbers of German bombers and bayonet-men, and again and again other
Midland lads went up that alleyway of death, flinging their grenades
until they fell or until few comrades were left to support them as they
stood among their dead and dying.

Single men held on, throwing and throwing, until there was no strength
in their arms to hurl another bomb, or until death came to them. Yet
the business went on through the darkness of the afternoon, and into
the deeper darkness of the night, lit luridly at moments by the white
illumination of German flares and by the flash of bursting shells.

Isolated machine-guns in uncaptured parts of the redoubt still beat a
tattoo like the ruffle of war-drums, and from behind the barriers in
the Big Willie trench came the sharp crack of English rifles, and dull
explosions of other bombs flung by other Englishmen very hard pressed
that night.

In the outer trenches, at the nose of the salient, fresh companies of
Sherwood lads were feeling their way along, mixed up confusedly with
comrades from other companies, wounded or spent with fighting, but
determined to hold the ground they had won.

Some of the Robin Hoods up Little Willie trench were holding out
desperately and almost at the last gasp, when they were relieved by
other Sherwoods, and it was here that a young officer named Vickers was
found in the way that won him his V.C.

Charles Geoffrey Vickers stood there for hours against a horde of men
eager for his death, eager to get at the men behind him. But they could
not approach. He and his fellow-bombers kept twenty yards o