There was a little farmhouse in our camp, an ordinary French farm building with a few round haystacks near it. When the fight began, we thought of using this building as a hospital; but it was so clear that the place was an absolute death-trap that we gave up that idea very quickly, and got our wounded under the shelter of one of the haystacks, where they were pretty safe so long as the stack did not catch fire, because a good thick stack will resist even direct artillery fire in a wonderful manner. But the Germans got their guns on this particular stack, and it was a very bad look-out for our poor, helpless fellows, many of whom had been badly mangled. As for the farmhouse it was blown to pieces, as I saw afterwards when I visited it, and not a soul could have lived in the place. Walls, windows, roof, ceilings--all were smashed, and the furniture was in fragments. A building like that was a fair target; but the haystack was different, and the Germans did a thing that no British gunners would have done. At that short distance they could see perfectly clearly what was happening--they could see that as our wounded fell we got hold of them and dragged them out of the deadly hail to the shelter of the stack, about a score of yards away, to comparative safety. Noticing this, one of the German officers immediately concentrated a heavy shell fire on the heap of wounded--thirty or forty helpless men--in an attempt to set fire to the stack. That was a deliberate effort to destroy wounded men. We saw that, and the sight helped us to put more strength into our determination to smash the German guns. The Germans were mad to wipe us out, and I know that for my own part I would not have fallen into their clutches alive. My mind was quite made up on that point, for I had seen many a British soldier who had fallen on the roadside, dead beat, and gone to sleep--and slept for the last time when the Germans came up. On a previous occasion we passed through one place where there had been a fight--it must have been in the darkness--and the wounded had been put in a cemetery, the idea being that the Germans would not touch a cemetery. That idea proved to be wrong. One of the German aeroplanes that were constantly hovering over the battery had given some German batteries our position, but we got away, and the German gunners, enraged at our escape, instantly dropped shells into the cemetery, to wipe the wounded out. If they would do that they would not hesitate to fire deliberately on our wounded under the haystack--and they did not hesitate.