A young lieutenant fell dead from a bullet wound after he had directed his men to their posts from the lip of a new mine-crater, as coolly as though he were a master of ceremonies in a Lancashire ballroom. Another, a champion bomb-thrower, with a range of forty yards, flung his hand-grenades at the enemy with untiring skill and with a fierce contempt of death, until he was killed by an answering shot. The N.C.O. ’s took up the command and the men “carried on” until they held all the chain of craters, crouching and panting above mangled men.

They were hours of anguish for many Germans, who lay wounded and half buried, or quite buried, in the chaos, of earth made by those mine-craters now doubly upheaved. Their screams and moans sounding above the guns, the frantic cries of men maddened under tons of earth, which kept them prisoners in deep pits below the crater lips, and awful inarticulate noises of human pain coming out of that lower darkness beyond the light of the rockets, made up a chorus of agony more than our men could endure, even in the heat of battle. They shouted across to the German grenadiers: