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Their lives were not worth half a minute's purchase, when suddenly a German officer leapt up on to the parapet, and, angrily waving back the machine-gunners, called out, in English, 'That's all right. You may take them in. These are no doubt exceptional cases; the rule is very different. But a good many of such cases are known to soldiers, and I have seen none of them in the press.
So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost several times and became "Devil's" Wood to men who lay there under the crash and fury of massed gun-fire until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when relieved by another brigade ordered to take their turn in that devil's caldron, or to recapture it when German bombing-parties and machine-gunners had followed in the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen trees, and in the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead and their dead to keep them company.
"Stop a moment, Alphonso! I have forgotten those condemned machine-gunners, as usual. Strafe them! Come on! Once more into the breach, Alphonso! There is a little side-alley down here that we have not tried." The indefatigable Cockerell turned down the Rue Gambetta, followed by Alphonso, faint but resigned. "Here is the very place!" announced Cockerell almost at once. "This house, Number Five.
Then through the silence, from nowhere it seemed, a half-spent bullet whistled and buried itself with a spiteful "phut." After a pause ... a whine, accompanied by others, falling short. In the distance his machine-gunners and advanced screen of scouts appeared ... the whining merged into a constant buzzing, men coughed furiously and bent forward, fell awkwardly ... straightened out.
The machine-gunners, seeing civilians in front of them, ceased firing. At Alost, a German company attacked the bridge. In front marched some thirty civilians with a machine-gun hidden behind them.
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