The fight that raged for two days on this ridge was not one of those in which the enemy put up his hands as soon as our men came on to him.  Far on the top of the hill to the right, and in the maze of trenches between, and in the dug-outs of the farm on the left, he was fighting stiffly over the whole front.  In the dim light, as the party which was to take the farm rushed into it, a machine-gun was barking at them from somewhere inside that rubbish yard itself.  They could hear the bark obviously very close to them, but it was impossible to say where it came from, whether thirty yards away or fifty.  They knew it must be firing from behind one of the heaps of rubbish where the entrances of the dug-outs probably were, firing obliquely and to its rear at the men who rushed past it.  They chose the heap which seemed most probable, and fired six rifle grenades all at once into it.  There was a clatter and dust; the machine-gun went out like a candle.  Later they found it lying smashed at the mouth of a shaft there.

[Illustration:  THE TUMBLED HEAP OF BRICKS AND TIMBER WHICH THE WORLD KNOWS AS MOUQUET FARM]

[Illustration:  “PAST THE MUD-HEAPS SCRAPED BY THE ROAD GANGS” (See p. 192).]

The Germans fought them from their rat-holes.  When a man peered down the dark staircase shaft, he sometimes received a shot from below, sometimes a rifle grenade fired through a hole in a sandbag barricade, which the Germans had made at the bottom of the stair.  Occasionally a face would be seen peering up from below—­for they refused to come out—­and our men would fling down a bomb or fire a couple of shots.  But those on the top of the stair always have the advantage.  The Germans were bombed and shot out of entrance after entrance, and at last came up through the only exit left to them.  Finding Australians swarming through the place, they surrendered; and the whole garrison of Mouquet Farm was accounted for.  Those who were not lying dead in the craters and dust-heap were prisoners.  Mouquet Farm was ours, and a line of Australian infantry was entrenching itself far ahead of it.

On the ridge the charge had farther to go.  It swarmed over one German trench and on to a more distant one.  The Germans fought it from their trench.  The rush was a long one, and the German had time to find his feet after the bombardment.  But the men he was standing up to were the offshoot of a famous Queensland regiment; and, though the German guardsmen showed more fight than any Germans we have met, they had no match for the fire of these boys.  The trench is said to have been crowded with German dead and wounded.  On the left the German tried at once to bomb his way back into the trench he had lost, and for a time he made some headway.  Part of the line was driven out of the trench into the craters on our side of it.  But before the bombing party had gone far, the Queenslanders were into the trench again with bomb and bayonet, and the trenches on the right flank of the attack were solidly ours.