[Illustration:  British Indian troops charging the German trenches at Neuve Chapelle

Germany counted on a revolution in India, but the Indian troops proved to be among the most loyal and brilliant fighters in the Imperial forces.]

“It was from the center of our attacking line that the assault was pressed home soonest.  The guns had done their work well.  The trenches were blown to irrecognizable pits dotted with dead.  The barbed wire had been cut like so much twine.  Starting from the Rue Tilleloy the Lincolns and the Berkshires were off the mark first, with orders to swerve to right and left respectively as soon as they had captured the first line of trenches, in order to let the Royal Irish Rifles and the Rifle Brigade through to the village.  The Germans left alive in the trenches, half demented with fright, surrounded by a welter of dead and dying men, mostly surrendered.  The Berkshires were opposed with the utmost gallantry by two German officers who had remained alone in a trench serving a machine gun.  But the lads from Berkshire made their way into that trench and bayoneted the Germans where they stood, fighting to the last.  The Lincolns, against desperate resistance, eventually occupied their section of the trench and then waited for the Irishmen and the Rifle Brigade to come and take the village ahead of them.  Meanwhile the second Thirty-ninth Garhwalis on the right had taken their trenches with a rush and were away towards the village and the Biez Wood.

“Things had moved so fast that by the time the troops were ready to advance against the village the artillery had not finished its work.  So, while the Lincolns and the Berks assembled the prisoners who were trooping out of the trenches in all directions, the infantry on whom devolved the honor of capturing the village, waited.  One saw them standing out in the open, laughing and cracking jokes amid the terrific din made by the huge howitzer shells screeching overhead and bursting in the village, the rattle of machine guns all along the line, and the popping of rifles.  Over to the right where the Garhwalis had been working with the bayonet, men were shouting hoarsely and wounded were groaning as the stretcher-bearers, all heedless of bullets, moved swiftly to and fro over the shell-torn ground.

“There was bloody work in the village of Neuve Chapelle.  The capture of a place at the Bayonet point is generally a grim business, in which instant, unconditional surrender is the only means by which bloodshed, a deal of bloodshed, can be prevented.  If there is individual resistance here and there the attacking troops cannot discriminate.  They must go through, slaying as they go such as oppose them (the Germans have a monopoly of the finishing-off of wounded men), otherwise the enemy’s resistance would not be broken, and the assailants would be sniped and enfiladed from hastily prepared strongholds at half a dozen different points.