Hereabouts, at the pits, the machine-gun fire on both sides was particularly deadly. Lieutenant Pepys, who was in charge of the machine-gun of our section, was killed by shots from German machine-guns, and when we went away we picked him up and carried him with us on the machine-gun limber until we buried him outside a little village in a colliery district.
He was a very nice gentleman and the first officer to go down. When he fell Lieutenant N. B. Dennison, the brigade machine-gun officer, took charge. He volunteered to take over the gun, and was either killed or wounded. Then Lieutenant Unett, the well-known gentleman jockey, crawled on his stomach to the first line of the trenches, with some men, dragging a machine-gun behind them. They got this gun into the very front of the line of the trenches, then opened fire on the Germans with disastrous effect. Lieutenant Unett was wounded and lay in the open all the time.
This gallant deed was done between twelve noon and one o’clock, and I was one of the few men who saw it. I am glad to be able to pay my humble tribute to it.
There was a battery of the Royal Field Artillery on our left rear, about 800 yards behind the front line of trenches. Our gunners had such excellent range on the Germans that the German gunners were finding them with high explosive shell. It was mostly those shells that were dropping on them till they got the range and killed the gunners. There were only about five who were not either killed or wounded. The officer was wounded; but in spite of that he carried a wounded man round the bottom of the hill, then went back and fetched another man and repeated the journey until he had taken every one of the five away. After that he returned, picked up a spade and smashed the sights of the gun and made it useless. We heard some time afterwards that he had been killed.
This brave deed was witnessed by most of us who were in the front line of trenches.
When the German guns were got into position in front of us and the Germans tried their hardest to blow us out of our trenches, they searched for our artillery and, failing to discover it, they grew more determined than ever to rout us out of the place from which we were doing deadly damage.