Desperate fighting was going on in front of this farm when the remains
of a battalion of Saxons, which, it appears, had been hastily brought
down from further north and thrown into the fight, having decided to
surrender en bloc, advanced toward our line. Not knowing what the
movement of this mass of men implied, our infantry poured a hail of
bullets into them, whereupon the survivors, some hundreds strong,
halted, threw down their rifles, and held up their hands, and one of
their number waved a white rag tied to a stick.

Our guns continued to fire from the rear, and whether our infantry,
who, by this time, have had some experience of the treachery of the
enemy, would have paid any attention to these signals is uncertain,
but the matter was taken out of their hands, for as soon as the
Prussian infantry on the north of this point realized what their Saxon
comrades were trying to do, they opened rapid fire from the flank,
enfilading the mass. It appears also that the news of what was
happening must have been telephoned back to the German artillery
further east--which was also probably Prussian, since its guns
suddenly opened on the Saxon infantry, and under this combined fire
most of the latter were very soon accounted for.

Among the many scenes of the war there has probably been no more
strange spectacle than that of the masses of gray-coated soldiers
standing out in the open, hands raised, amidst the dead and dying,
being butchered by their own comrades before the eyes of the British
infantry. The fact that the victims of this slaughter were Saxons was
a source of regret to us, since the Saxons have always proved
themselves more chivalrous and less brutal than either the Prussians
or the Bavarians--in fact, cleaner fighters in every way.

While we were thus pressing forward gradually on the section of front
between our two original points of penetration, our troops on the
right in front of Festubert were making good progress southward along
the German trenches. Their attack began at 11:30 A.M., and the Germans
were soon cleared out of their line in this quarter up to a point a
short distance south of Festubert, where they made a strong resistance
and checked our further lateral progress.

[Illustration: Map of the British position. The solid line represents
the territory held by the British, the dotted line to the north
showing the position of the Franco-Belgian Army, and the dotted line
to the south the position