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.