. . It was the signal for seven
hundred and fifty of our heavy guns and two thousand of our field--
guns to open fire, and behind a moving wall of bursting shells
English, Irish, and New Zealand soldiers moved forward in dense waves.
It was almost a "walk-over." Only here and there groups of Germans
served their machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were
stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and
deepest dugouts. I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared
into their great gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been
engulfed there. The following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to
the ruins of the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had
passed this way when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with
wings and outhouses and a large community of nuns and children.
Through my glasses I had often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the
Scherpenberg. Now nothing was left but a pile of broken bricks, not
very high.
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