ther thirty yards away or fifty. They knew it must be firing
from behind one of the heaps of rubbish where the entrances of the
dug-outs probably were, firing obliquely and to its rear at the men who
rushed past it. They chose the heap which seemed most probable, and
fired six rifle grenades all at once into it. There was a clatter and
dust; the machine-gun went out like a candle. Later they found it lying
smashed at the mouth of a shaft there.

[Illustration: THE TUMBLED HEAP OF BRICKS AND TIMBER WHICH THE WORLD
KNOWS AS MOUQUET FARM]

[Illustration: "PAST THE MUD-HEAPS SCRAPED BY THE ROAD GANGS" (_See p.
192_).]

The Germans fought them from their rat-holes. When a man peered down the
dark staircase shaft, he sometimes received a shot from below,
sometimes a rifle grenade fired through a hole in a sandbag barricade,
which the Germans had made at the bottom of the stair. Occasionally a
face would be seen peering up from below--for they refused to come
out--and our men would fling down a bomb or fire a couple of shots. But
those on the top of the stair always have the advantage. The Germans
were bombed and shot out of entrance after entrance, and at last came up
through the only exit left to them. Finding Australians swarming through
the place, they surrendered; and the whole garrison of Mouquet Farm was
accounted for. Those who were not lying dead in the craters and
dust-heap were prisoners. Mouquet Farm was ours, and a line of
Australian infantry was entrenching itself far ahead of it.

On the ridge the charge had farther to go. It swarmed over one German
trench and on to a more distant one. The Germans fought it from their
trench. The rush was a long one, and the German had time to find his
feet after the bombardment. But the men he was standing up to were the
offshoot of a famous Queensland regiment; and, though the German
guardsmen showed more fight than any Germans we have met, they had no
match for the fire of these boys. The trench is said to have been
crowded with German dead and wounded. On the left the German tried at
once to bomb his way back into the trench he had lost, and for a time he
made some headway. Part of the line was driven out of the trench into
the craters on our side of it. But before the bombing party had gone
far, the Queenslanders were into the trench again with bomb and bayonet,
and the trenches on the right flank of the attack were solidly ours.

The Queenslanders who reached this tre