There was no time to think, but the sight of the Infant, lying there dead, sent a kind of sudden heat through me from inside; as I felt it on patrol that night. I hurried on, with Corporal Slade close on my heels. The gassy smoke was very dense. Round the next traverse was the little bay from which the other machine-gun had been firing. It wasn't firing now. Two men were lying dead close beside it, and another badly wounded; and half across the parapet was Sergeant T----, who'd been in charge of the gun, being hauled out by his arms by two Boches, while two other Boches stood by, one holding his rifle with bayonet fixed, in the thrust position, as if inclined to run T---- through. The other Boches were shouting something in German. They wanted to make T---- prisoner. There was blood on one side of his neck. The insolence of the thing made me quite mad for the minute, and I screamed at those Boches like a maniac. It seems rum, but they turned and bolted into the smoke; I after them as hard as I could pelt. I shot one in the back with my revolver. He fell and, as I came up with him, I snatched his rifle from the ground beside him. I was like a lunatic. Then, just as suddenly, I came to my senses. The other Boches were out of sight in the smoke. I jumped back into the trench and put Corporal Slade on to the machine-gun, telling him to keep traversing that front. I ran farther down the trench to discover what had happened. The fire trench dipped there into a wooded hollow. The pounding of it had levelled the whole place till you could hardly make out the trench line. Here I found the bulk of my own platoon furiously scrapping with thirty or forty Boches over the parapet. It was splendid. I can't describe the feeling, as one rushed into it. But it was absolutely glorious. And it gave me my first taste of bayonet work in earnest--with a Boche bayonet in my hand, mark you. Made me quite glad of the bayonet practice we had at home with Sergeant W----, after he'd had the course at Aldershot. No. 1 Platoon had never let the beggars get as far as our trench, but met 'em outside. To give them their due, those Boches didn't try any of their "Kamerade" business. They did fight--until they saw half their number stuck and down; and then they turned and bolted for it into the dense smoke over No Man's Land. They were most of 'em bayoneted in the back before I could get my fellows to turn. I didn't want them to go far in that dense fog of gassy smoke, and there was hardly any daylight left. I didn't want them tumbling into any ambush. On the way back we gathered up a score of Boche knives, a lot of their caps, two or three rifles, and a whole box of their hand grenades, with not one missing.