The Germans swung around them, circling them with machine guns and rifles and pouring a fire into them until only eighteen men were left. Those eighteen, standing among their wounded and their dead, did not surrender. The army wanted forty-eight hours. They fixed bayonets and went out against the enemy and drove through him. A wounded Corporal of Grenadiers, who afterward got back to the British lines, lay in a ditch, and the last he saw of his comrades was when fourteen men of them were still fighting in a swarm of Germans. Fought Back to Back The Coldstream Guards were surrounded in the same way and fought in the same way. The army had asked for forty-eight hours until the Australians could come, and many of the Coldstreamers eked out the time with their lives. The enemy filtered in on their flanks, came crawling around them with machine guns, sniped them from short range and raked them from ditches and upheaved earth. The Coldstream Guards had to fall back, but they fought back in small groups, facing all ways and making gaps in the enemy's ranks, not firing wildly, but using every round of small-arms ammunition to keep a German back and gain a little more time. Forty-eight hours is a long time in a war like this. For two days and nights the Irish Guards, who had come up to support the Grenadiers and Coldstreamers, tried to make a defensive flank, but the enemy worked past their right and attacked them on two sides. The Irish Guards were gaining time. They knew that was all they could do, just drag out the hours by buying each minute with their blood. One man fell and then another; but minutes were gained, and quarters of hours and hours. Small parties of them lowered their bayonets and went out among the gray wolves swarming around them, and killed a number of them until they also fell. First one party and then another of these Irish Guards made those bayonet charges against men with machine guns and volleys of rifle fire. They bought time at a high price, but they did not stint themselves nor stop their bidding because of its costliness. The brigade of Guards here and near Vieux Berquin held out for those forty-eight hours, and some of them were fighting still when the Australians arrived, according to the timetable. Carnage Near Locre _Mr. Gibbs, in a dispatch dated May 3, gave these vivid descriptions of the fighting in the Locre-Dranoutre-Kemmel region:_