I saw one sergeant kill fourteen Germans, one after the other. They came up in fifties, all in a cluster, and you couldn’t help hitting them. They were only 400 yards from us all day on Sunday. They are very cruel. Our people used a church for a hospital, and it was filled with our wounded, but the place was shelled and knocked down. They stabbed a good many of our men while lying on the battlefield. They have no respect for the Red Cross. To see women and children driven from home and walking the roads is terrible--old men and women just the same. At the town where we were we got cut off from our people--eighteen of us--and the houses were being toppled over by the German artillery. The people clung around us, asking us to stay with them, but it was no good. When we left, the town was in flames. But our men did fight well. You never saw anything so cool in your life. Anyone would have thought it was a football match, for they were joking and laughing with one another.
_Letter 72.--From John Baker, of the Royal Flying Corps, to his parents at Boston, Lincolnshire:_
While flying over Boulogne at a height of 3,000 feet, something went wrong with the machine, and the engine stopped. The officer said, “Baker, our time has come. Be brave, and die like a man. Good-bye,” and shook hands with me. I shall always remember the ten minutes that followed. The next I remembered was that I was in a barn. I was removed to Boulogne, and afterwards to Netheravon, being conveyed from Southampton by motor ambulance.
The Germans are good and bad as fighters, but mostly bad so far as I have seen. They are nearly all long distance champions in the fighting line, and won’t come too near unless they are made to. Yesterday we had a whole day of it in the trenches, with the Germans firing away at us all the time. It began just after breakfast, and we were without food of any kind until we had what you might call a dainty afternoon tea in the trenches under shell fire. The mugs were passed round with the biscuits and the “bully” as best they could by the mess orderlies, but it was hard work getting through without getting more than we wanted of lead rations. My next-door neighbour, so to speak, got a shrapnel bullet in his tin mug, and another two doors off had his biscuit shot out of his hand when he was fool enough to hold it up to show it to a chum in the next trench.