I was in the second wave, and we walked to the German trenches as if on parade.  Several of my pals got hit going over, and when we got there we found all the German sentries had been killed by our artillery fire, and the rest were in their dugouts, which, by the way, are about 30 feet deep. 

Well, our job was to bomb these dugouts.  After bombing several of them, to our amazement about 30 of them came up out of one of them.  They had no equipment, nor rifles, and shouted, ‘Kamerade!’  Well, we soon packed them off over the top to our own trenches. 

Meanwhile, the German barrage of fire was so terrific that several of those prisoners were hit by their own fire in their endeavours to get to our lines.  The rest of our boys had meanwhile taken the second and third German lines of trenches, and another battalion had gone further on and suffered very heavy losses, and eventually had to retire, and we couldn’t get any reserves up, as the Germans had repulsed the attacks on our right and left, and turned a triple barrage of fire on our sector, and it was impossible to get reserves up, so we were landed on our own - the whole of our brigade to hold on to these trenches. 

Well, they made a counter-attack on us with grenades, and our supply was running short.  I was in the German second line at the time, and our fellows had to retire from the third to the second line which we held on to until about 5 o’clock in the evening. 

Then we were pushed back to their original first line, and at about 7.30 or a little later, within 12 hours of our arrival in their trenches, we had to pack up and make a dash for it over the open about 350 yards, and many fell in that retirement, but it was the only thing to do. 

We had thrown hundreds of German grenades back at them, but eventually we ran out of them.  Unfortunately, we lost nearly every officer that went over, and all our captains.  What few got back were jolly lucky.