But our boys worked their way forward with a wonderful sort of deliberateness, fighting their way upward on the knoll in small packs. In some marvelous fashion enough of us survived--I think we must have numbered five to six hundred in this final successful attack--to swarm about the German block-houses, smash our way inside, strike, kill and finally so terrorize the Bavarian defenders that they completely surrendered. In the larger block-houses there were companies of about forty men. In the smaller, groups numbering about fifteen. From these garrisons we took some four hundred prisoners. The prisoners told us that they had deemed the attacking force a much larger one than it really was, but they had not dared retreat--had stuck and fought so desperately because they were ordered to defend the position to the death and feared to retire to the main body because of the punishment they felt sure would be meted out to them there. There were other features of that advance through Delville woods than the final, ghastly drive up the armed hill. Deadly perils they were and which we continued to run into in the four days following as we grimly, under frightful shell fire and many counter attacks, held on to the ridge. Escaping the barbed-wire entanglements, there were the dangers of hidden pits dug by the Germans. At the bottom of these pits were bayonets rooted so that their points came uppermost and as we marched along we would go plunging head foremost into these pits, falling on the points of the bayonets. Under other camouflage of foliage were concealed the deadliest mines. Did you step lightly on them or stub them with your toe, they would blow you to pieces. Rifles were cunningly wrought into the barbed-wire entanglements in a manner to be unseen. Contact with the wire electrically set the rifles blazing at you from all angles with almost the certainty of their bullets killing at least one or two of the wire-cutters. It wasn’t to be supposed that the Germans were going to let us sit peacefully down to our tea and jam in our hard-won concrete forts. We had no sooner got the wounded started on their way to the field hospitals, and sent the surly four hundred prisoners trudging back to our main lines under guard, than the first counter attack was made. We drove it off. They tried three times again that day, but were smashed back every time. They kept us hopping all the time--nearly every hour for the four days we held the ridge--under their shell fire, but their artillery did not do much more execution to the position than had our own.