Bugler Lee shouted to me: "I'm shot through the leg." A couple of us seized him, planning to go down to where the communication trench had once been. But he stopped us, saying: "It's no good, boys. It's a dead end! They're killing us."
Cosh swore. "Don't give up, kid! We'll beat the ---- yet!" A German standing a few yards away raised his rifle and blew his head off. Young Brown broke down at this--they had just done in his wounded pal: "Oh, look! Look what they've done to Davie," and fell to weeping. And with that another put the muzzle of his rifle against the boy's head and pulled the trigger.
Young Cox from Winnipeg put his hands above his head at the order. His captor placed the muzzle of his rifle squarely against the palm and blew it off. There remained only a bloody and broken mass dangling from the wrist.
[Illustration: GERMAN PRISONERS AFTER A SUCCESSFUL CANADIAN ATTACK, BRINGING WOUNDED MEN DOWN A COMMUNICATION TRENCH.]
I saw a man who had come up in the draft with me on the 4th, rolling around in the death agony, tossing his head loosely about in the wild pain of it, his pallid face a white mark in the muck underfoot. A burly German reached the spot and without hesitation plunged his saw-edged bayonet through the throat.
Close by another wounded man was struggling feebly under a pile of earth, his legs projecting so that only the convulsive heaving of the loose earth indicated that a man was dying underneath. Another German observed that too, and shoved his bayonet through the mud and held it savagely there until all was quiet.
This I did not see, but another did and told me of it afterward. Sergeant Phillpots had been shot through the jaw so that he went to his knees as a bullock does at the slaughtering. He supported himself waveringly by his hands. The blood poured from him so that he was all but fainting with the loss of it.
Phillpots looked up: "Play the game! Play the game!" he muttered weakly.
The German coolly put a round through his head.
I was still without a bayonet, and seeing these things, said to Easton: "We'd better beat it."
He swore again. "Yes, they're murdering us. No use stopping here. Come on!"
And just then he, too, dropped. I thought him dead. There was no use in my stopping to share his fate or worse. It was now every man for himself. At a later date we met in England.