The Seed of Empire by Fred M. White

It was a great day for the Musketeers, a great day indeed for all the regiments engaged. On the left the Worcesters and the East Lances and the Sherwood Foresters, and other regiments coming up in support took up the good work and continued the attack. The Worcesters were fortunate enough to find themselves engaged in a little contest all to themselves. They had rounded up a mob of Germans in another orchard and driven them into a farmhouse to the north, which, as it transpired, was about the last stronghold of the position held by the foe. The Worcesters would not be denied. They went into the engagement full of pluck and spirit, and once they got the foe going they hunted them up and down those muddy fields as if they had been so many terriers let loose in a barnyard amongst the rats at threshing-time. They hunted them with the bayonet round and round the trees as if they had been playing some game, and drove them into the farmhouse, where they shot them down in scores. Many of the Germans were so panic-stricken that they attempted to force their way up the farmhouse chimneys, only to be dragged down and taken prisoners. It was strange that that farmhouse, more or less in the line of the German trenches, had escaped the destruction wrought by the heavy fire of the British guns, but so it was, and that the Germans had made good use of it was proved by the fact that every bedroom was lined with sandbags, and every window boasted a machine gun.

It still lacked a few minutes to the hour of 2 when the whole village and its outlying houses were in the hands of the British, and even then the advance had not been quite so quick as anticipated for the reason that here and there certain brigades had been delayed by the barbed wire entanglements. Apart from that, the conditions were all in favour of a further advance towards the ridge. For the Germans were fairly on the run now, and all their iron discipline was lost. It was in vain that their officers tried to rally them: indeed, the mental and physical condition of the prisoners was eloquent testimony to the complete demoralisation which had set in. It is no exaggeration to say that the prisoners were panic-stricken. They were not old men, either, not men past the military age, riot men of the Landsturm or Landwehr, but fine, well built and nourished young Prussians and Bavarians, well clad and perfectly equipped.