_Under date of May 21, 1915, an Eyewitness with the British
Headquarters in France, continues and supplements his narrative of
operations:_
The ground our troops were holding on Monday, May 17, projected as two
salients into the enemy's territory, one south of Richebourg-L'Avoue
and the other to the north of Festubert. The purpose of the operations
undertaken on Monday was to connect up the space which lay between
them. In this we were successful.
At about 9:30 A.M. on Monday, May 17, our forces attacked the enemy
occupying this area, from north and south, and gradually drove him
from all his intrenchments within it. The Germans here, pressed on
three sides, subjected to a cross-fire from several directions and to
continuous bombing, reached the limits of their endurance during the
morning, and over 300 surrendered.
After this area had been made good by us fighting continued throughout
the day, and our troops, having joined hands, pressed the enemy still
further eastward, forcing them out of one post after another. As the
afternoon wore on more prisoners fell into our hands, entire groups of
men giving themselves up.
The centres of the hostile resistance in this quarter were the
clusters of buildings which were very strongly held and surrounded by
networks of trenches dotted with numerous machine gun posts, and in
front of one of the nests of works near the Ferme Cour de L'Avoue,
between La Quinque Rue and Richebourg-L'Avoue, a horrible scene was
witnessed by our troops during the day.
Desperate fighting was going on in front of this farm when the remains
of a battalion of Saxons, which, it appears, had been hastily brought
down from further north and thrown into the fight, having decided to
surrender en bloc, advanced toward our line. Not knowing what the
movement of this mass of men implied, our infantry poured a hail of
bullets into them, whereupon the survivors, some hundreds strong,
halted, threw down their rifles, and held up their hands, and one of
their number waved a white rag tied to a stick.
Our guns continued to fire from the rear, and whether our infantry,
who, by this time, have had some experience of the treachery of the
enemy, would have paid any attention to these signals is uncertain,
but the matter was taken out of their hands, for as soon as the
Prussian infantry on the north of this point realized what their Saxon
comrades were trying to do, they opened rapid fire from the flank,
enfilading the mass. It appears also that the news of what was
happening must have been telephoned back to the German artillery
further east--which was also probably Prussian, since its guns
suddenly opened on the Saxon infantry, and under this combined fire
most of the latter were very soon accounted for.
Among the many scenes of the war there has probably been no more
strange spectacle than that of the masses of gray-coated soldiers
standing out in the open, hands raised, amidst the dead and dying,
being butchered by their own comrades before the eyes of the British
infantry. The fact that the victims of this slaughter were Saxons was
a source of regret to us, since the Saxons have always proved
themselves more chivalrous and less brutal than either the Prussians
or the Bavarians--in fact, cleaner fighters in every way.
While we were thus pressing forward gradually on the section of front
between our two original points of penetration, our troops on the
right in front of Festubert were making good progress southward along
the German trenches. Their attack began at 11:30 A.M., and the Germans
were soon cleared out of their line in this quarter up to a point a
short distance south of Festubert, where they made a strong resistance
and checked our further lateral progress.
[Illustration: Map of the British position. The solid line represents
the territory held by the British, the dotted line to the north
showing the position of the Franco-Belgian Army, and the dotted line
to the south the position of the French Army.]
The fighting here was made up of a series of isolated and desperate
hand-to-hand combats with bayonet and hand grenades, and, since the
Germans were, at many points, outflanked and enfiladed, their losses
were very heavy, for in the narrow trenches there was often no room
for escape, and the only alternative was death or surrender. In some
places the trenches presented a horrible sight, being heaped with
German corpses, many of whom had been blown to pieces by our
bombardment carried out previous to the original attack. By about noon
the total number of prisoners captured since the commencement of the
attack on Sunday had increased to 550.
On the extreme right the Germans were pressed back along their
communication trenches in such large numbers that they occasionally
formed an excellent mark for the machine guns in our own line to the
north of Givenchy, which were able to do great execution at certain
points.
By midday the total front of the "bite" taken by us out of the enemy's
position was almost exactly two miles long; but, as trenches and
isolated posts were taken and retaken several times, the exact
situation at any moment, as is usual in such cases, is somewhat
obscure. Further progress was made to the south during the afternoon
and after dark, and various posts and breastworks east of La Quinque
Rue, from which we had withdrawn the previous night, again fell into
our hands, although the enemy continued to hold some trenches in rear
of them. But they again formed an exposed salient, and were once more
temporarily evacuated by us.
At nightfall we held a continuous line embracing the whole of the
German original front trenches from the south of Festubert to
Richebourg-L'Avoue, and, in many places, were in possession of the
whole series of hostile entrenchments, with the exception of a few
supporting points and machine-gun posts in rear of the zone.