Our 12th Division was ordered to drive them out - a division of English county troops, including the Sussex, Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex - all those country boys of ours fought their way among communication trenches, burrowed into tunnels, crouched below hummocks of earth and brick, and with bombs and bayonets and broken rifles, and boulders of stone, and German stick-bombs, and any weapon that would kill, gained yard by yard over the dead bodies of the enemy, or by the capture of small batches of cornered men, until after seventeen days of this one hundred and forty men of the 3rd Prussian Guard, the last of their garrison, without food or water, raised a signal of surrender, and came out with their hands up. 

Ovillers was a shambles, in a fight of primitive earth-men like human beasts.  Yet our men were not beast-like.  They came out from those places - if they had the luck to come out - apparently unchanged, without any mark of the beast on them, and when they cleansed themselves of mud and filth, boiled the lice out of their shirts, and assembled in a village street behind the lines, they whistled, laughed, gossiped, as though nothing had happened to their souls - though something had really happened, as now we know.