"I found myself running forward again. I called to men lying and running near and held my revolver at them. We were all charging with bayonets back at the Germans shooting us from our own trenches under the raised bank. They did not wait for us. They looked like frightened gray beetles as they scrambled up away over our bank and down into the river. It was dusk, but we shot at them over the bank. The water seemed full of them. We crouched in a big trench in muddy water behind the bank. No, we did not sleep, but my head and eyes seemed to go to sleep from time to time. "There were perhaps 200 left of our 600. I think there was one officer further along, but it was quite dark. Some of the men talked very low. Then I heard voices whispering and talking near us on the river side of our bank. It was of earth perhaps five feet high and six feet thick. On the other side the slope fell steeply to the river. "I sent a hush along the line. We listened quite silent. I thought I heard German words, an order passed along on the other side. I crawled up on to the bank, not showing my head, you know. It was really about 300 Germans who had stayed there on our side under the bank, fearing to cross the river under our fire. So we stayed all through the night. We did not sleep nor did they. "There was just six feet of piled wet earth between us. We only whispered and could hear them muttering and the sound of their belts creaking and of water bottles being opened. "There was a thick gray mist hanging low in the morning. I crawled on to the bank again, holding my revolver out-stretched. A gray figure stood up in the mist below close to me. He looked like a British soldier in khaki. He said: 'It's all right, we are English,' and I said, 'But your accent isn't,' and I shot him through with my revolver. Some of our men crept to the bank, but they shot them, and some of theirs climbed over, but we fired at their heads or arms as they showed only a few feet away, and they fell backward [Transcriber: original 'bakward'] or on to us or lay hanging on the bank. Then we all waited. "As it grew lighter they did not dare move away, and none of us could get out alive or over the bank to use the bayonet. A few men made holes in the looser earth, and so we fired at each other through the bank here and there. Our guns could not help us, and theirs could not shoot across, for we were all together, and yet we could not get at each other. Some of the men--theirs and ours--got over lower down, so there was firing now and then, and two men were killed near me sliding down into the water in the trenches. "Somebody threw a cartridge case across close to me. On a paper inside was scrawled one word: 'Surrender!' We did not know if they wanted to surrender themselves or wanted us to surrender. They were more numerous, but we were better placed, so we went on scrapping and crawling around to get a shot at them.