Our 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 spearhead, the Germans kept up a furious bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in bursts of gunfire 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.