At four o'clock in the afternoon our guns
concentrated on the village, and under the cover of that fire our men
advanced on three sides of it, hemmed it in, and captured it with the
garrison of the 122d Bavarian Regiment, who had suffered the agonies
of hell inside its ruins. Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this
time German shells smashed into the chateau and the cottages and left
nothing but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I
went walking with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now
being shelled in that place.
Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert-Bapaume road, there had
been a village called Ovillers. It was no longer there. Our guns has
removed every trace of it, except as it lay in heaps of pounded brick.
The Germans had a network of trenches about it, and in their ditches
and their dugouts they fought like wolves. Our 12th Division was
ordered to drive them out--a division of English county troops,
including the Sussex, Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex--and those
country boys of ours fought their way among communication trenches,
burrowed into tunnels, crouched below hummocks of earth and brick, and
with bombs and bayonets and broken rifles, and boulders of stone, and
German stick-bombs, and any weapon that would kill, gained yard by
yard over the dead bodies of the enemy, or by the capture of small
batches of cornered men, until after seventeen days of this one
hundred and forty men of the 3rd Prussian Guard, the last of their
garrison, without food or water, raised a signal of surrender, and
came out with their hands up.
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