Just before 5.30 the guns suddenly stopped. The officers passed the word, “Prepare to go over.” Next second the Brigade-Major blew his whistle. Whistles sounded all along the trench. The 150 clambered over the sandbags without a word. There was no cheering. With eyes fixed upon the low white line of loopholed parapet in front, the heavily laden men trotted and stumbled forward across that open patch of heath, rugged with pitfalls, fragments of shell, and wire. The Turkish guns, sighted for our trenches, could not range upon them, and in the first rush few fell. In less than a minute from the start, nearly all had reached that white and loopholed line, and, with sharpened bayonets raised, were prepared to burst through the entanglements and leap into the trench below. They burst the entanglement, but there was no visible trench below. The whole trench was thickly roofed with heavy baulks of fir timber, railway sleepers, branches of trees, earth, and rocks. The trench was one prolonged, impenetrable dug-out, loophooled along the front line like a subterranean castle. Some of the advanced party ran forward over the solid roof, reached the open second line of trenches, reached the communication trenches up which the Turks were crowding, and fired into the thick of the enemy wherever they found them. They sprang down separately into the midst of them, and fought single-handed with bayonet and bombs, spreading terror and confusion before they died. But the majority scattered out in line along the face of the first parapet, as though along a curb, peering and poking for an entrance, while the Turks poured bullets upwards upon them through loopholes and imperceptible apertures. Some of our men fired back through the loopholes; some, in groups, with desperate strength, wrenched up the heavy beams and tore the roof open; some discovered narrow man-holes left in the covering for the exit and entrance of “listeners” at night. Wherever a sufficient opening was made or found, a man wriggled feet foremost down through it, helpless and exposed until he dropped into the thick of foes scarcely visible in the cavernous obscurity. It took fifteen minutes for all the men standing exposed in the open to get down.