The first sight that met him, as he reached the support line of German trenches, was two wounded Australians lying in the bottom of it.  So the British must be attacking, he thought.  He ordered his platoon to advance over the trench and counter-attack.  But in the dark and the dust they lost touch and straggled to the north—­he saw no more of them.  He tumbled on with two men into a shell crater and began to improve it for defence—­then they found Australians towering around them in the dark.  They surrendered.

It was a most difficult business to get the various parties for our attack into position in the night, and some of the troops behind had to be pushed forward hurriedly.  In consequence the officers out in front had to carry on as if theirs were the only troops in the attack, and see the whole fight through without relying upon supports.  The way in which junior officers and N.C.O.’s have acted upon their own initiative during some of this fighting has been beyond praise.  The attack went through up to time.  The supports had to come in parties organised in the dark on the spur of the moment.  The Germans had several machine-guns going.  But as another German officer told me, “This time they came on too thick.  We might have held them in front, but they got in on one side of us; then we heard they were in on the other; then they came from the rear as well—­on all four sides.  What could we do?”

Almost immediately after the Australians reached the trenches, watchers far behind could see the horizon beyond them lit by five slow illuminations, about ten minutes’ interval between each.  They were beyond the crest of the hill.  I do not know, but I think the German must have been blowing up his field-gun ammunition.

The men in the new trenches may, or may not, have seen this.  What they did notice, as soon as the battle cleared and they had time to look into the darkness in front of them, was a succession of brilliant glares from some position just hidden by the slope of the hill.  It was the flash of the German guns which were firing at them.  It is, as far as I know, the first time in this battle that our men have seen the actual flash of the enemy’s guns.

When day broke they found beyond them a wide, flat stretch of hill-top, with a distant hill line beyond.  Far down the slope there were Germans moving.  And in the distant landscape they saw the German gun teams limber up and hurry away with the field guns which for a fortnight had been firing upon our men.

The Germans have twice afterwards attacked that position.  In the early light of the first morning a party of them came tumbling up from some trench against a sector of the captured line.  In front of them was an officer, well ahead, firing his automatic pistol as he went, levelling it first at one Australian, then at another, as he saw them in the trenches before him.  He was shot, and the attack quickly melted; it never seemed very serious.  Two days later, after a long, heavy bombardment, the Germans attacked again—­this time about fifteen hundred of them.  They penetrated the two trenches at one point, but our company officers, again acting on their own initiative, charged them straight, on the instant, without hesitation.  Every German in that section was captured, and a few Australians, whom they had taken, were released.