Enemy aeroplanes now swooped down with machine-gun fire; there seemed no way of getting our artillery to attend to them and they pecked like vultures undisturbed. Then Battalion Headquarters came up in the midst of the firing from the left, established themselves in a dug-out and were at once vigorously shelled, together with the neighbouring aid-post and some German prisoners there, waiting to carry down wounded. The aid-post was in charge of a young American doctor, Rhys Davis by name, who had been attached to the Battalion for some time. This was his first day of war and he was mortally wounded before the noon of it.
The trench filled as the day went on, with details dropping in by devious and hurried roads to meet the continual stream of prisoners being handed down to Brigade Headquarters. One youth, who could not have been seventeen, flung himself into the arms of an officer and cried, “Kamerad, Herr Offizier! Ich bin sehr jung! Kamerad!” To whom the embarrassed Islander said brutally: “Get on with you. _I_ wouldn’t touch you for the world!” And they laughed all along the trench-face as they dodged the whizz-bangs out of Orival Wood, and compared themselves to the “wurrums begging for mercy.”
About noon, after many adventures, the 2nd Grenadiers arrived to carry on the advance, and Silver Street became a congested metropolis. The 2nd Grenadiers were hung up there for a while because, though the Third Division on the right had taken Flesquières, the Sixty-third on the left had not got Graincourt village, which was enfilading the landscape damnably. Orival Wood, too, was untaken, and the 1st Grenadiers, under Lord Gort, were out unsupported half a mile ahead on the right front somewhere near Premy Chapel. Meantime, a battalion of the Second Division, which was to come through the Guards Division and continue the advance, flooded up Silver Street, zealously unreeling its telephone wires; Machine-Gun Guards were there, looking for positions; the 2nd Grenadiers were standing ready; the Welsh Guards were also there with intent to support the Grenadiers; walking wounded were coming down, and severe cases were being carried over the top by German prisoners who made no secret of an acute desire to live and jumped in among the rest without leave asked. The men compared the crush to a sugar-queue at home. To cap everything, some wandering tanks which had belonged to the Division on the right had strayed over to the left. No German battery can resist tanks, however disabled; so they drew fire, and when they were knocked out (our people did not know this at first, being unused to working with them), made life insupportable with petrol-fumes for a hundred yards round.