who
planned it hold the secret. It cost a heavy price in life and agony. It
demonstrated the fighting spirit of many English boys who did the best
they could, with the rage, and fear, and madness of great courage,
before they died or fell, and it left some living men, and others who
relieved them in Big Willie and Little Willie trenches, so close to the
enemy that one could hear them cough, or swear in guttural whispers.

And through the winter of '15, and the years that followed, the
Hohenzollern redoubt became another Hooge, as horrible as Hooge, as
deadly, as damnable in its filthy perils, where men of English blood,
and Irish, and Scottish, took their turn, and hated it, and counted
themselves lucky if they escaped from its prison-house, whose walls
stank of new and ancient death.

* * *

Among those who took their turn in the hell of the Hohenzollern were
the men of the 12th Division, New Army men, and all of the old stock and
spirit of England, bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, Gloucester
and Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex (which meant
London), as the names of their battalions told. In September they
relieved the Guards and cavalry at Loos; in December they moved on to
Givenchy, and in February they began a long spell at the Hohenzollern.
It was there the English battalions learned the worst things of war and
showed the quality of English courage.

A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, was marvelous in
spirit, stronger than the flesh.

On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his company along an
enemy trench, but his own bombing--party was cut off, owing to heavy
casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter
went back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs.

On the return journey his right leg was blown off close below the knee
and he was wounded in both arms. By a kind of miracle--the miracle of
human courage--he did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench,
mud so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk--but made his way
along fifty yards of trench toward the crater where his comrades were
hard pressed. He came up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing
with his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to him and
directed him to bomb six feet toward where help was most needed, and
worked his way forward to the crater where the Germans had developed a
violent counter-attack.

Men fell rapidl