Unluckily for the enemy, however, flanking them and only some 400 yards away, there happened to be a machine gun manned by a detachment of the "Queen's." This at once opened fire, cutting a lane through their mass, and they fell back to their own trench with great loss. Shortly afterwards they were driven further back with additional loss by a battalion of the Guards, which came up in support. During the fighting, also, some German ambulance wagons advanced in order to collect the wounded. An order to cease fire was consequently given to our guns, which were firing on this particular section of ground. The German battery commanders at once took advantage of the lull in the action to climb up their observation ladders and on to haystacks to locate our guns, which soon afterwards came under a far more accurate fire than any to which they had been subjected up to that time. A British officer who was captured by the Germans, and has since escaped, reports that while a prisoner he saw men who had been fighting subsequently put on Red Cross brassards. That the irregular use of the protection afforded by the Geneva Convention is not uncommon is confirmed by the fact that on one occasion men in the uniform of combatant units have been captured wearing the Red Cross brassard hastily slipped over the arm. The excuse given has been that they had been detailed after a fight to look after the wounded. It is reported by a cavalry officer that the driver of a motor-car with a machine gun mounted on it, which he captured, was wearing the Red Cross. A curious feature of this strange siege-battle was that villages and hamlets between the fighting lines still continued, where not destroyed, to be in part, at any rate, inhabited, and at intervals peasants worked in the intervening fields. The Germans took advantage of this to push their spy system. The suspicions of some French troops (of the 5th army) were aroused by coming across a farm from which the horses had not been removed. After some search they discovered a telephone which was connected by an underground cable with the German lines, and the owner of the farm paid the penalty usual in war for his treachery. Some of the methods being employed for the collection or conveyance of intelligence were:-- Men in plain clothes who signalled to the German lines from points in the hands of the enemy by means of coloured lights at night and puffs of smoke from chimneys by day. Pseudo-labourers working in the fields between the armies who conveyed information, and persons in plain clothes acting as advanced scouts. German officers and soldiers in plain clothes or in French or British uniforms remained in localities evacuated by the Germans in order to furnish them with intelligence.