at La Baraque. “G” Office was here snugly harboured at the bottom of a large and roomy “Boche” dug-out, and on the night of October 3rd a party of seventy or eighty German prisoners from the Battle of Ramicourt were waiting outside in the dusk for their turn for examination by the Staff Intelligence officer. Suddenly, the three whistles were heard and the drone of a German plane became audible, increasing in loudness as the plane approached and swooped towards the ground. There must still have been sufficient light for the airman, who was himself plainly visible to the watchers below, to see the body of men beneath him, though it was certainly far too dark for him to have been able to distinguish the field-grey uniform.
Just before he reached the group, he must have moved the lever controlling his bomb-dropping apparatus, and two bombs dropped almost simultaneously, both of which exploded in or near the unfortunate group of prisoners.
The scene that followed was indescribable. With the explosion, there arose a wail of anguish from the victims of the bomb, and, for a few seconds afterwards, there was a soft sickening rain of blood, fragments of flesh, and limbs, over the whole of the immediate neighbourhood. Some forty or fifty of the unfortunate prisoners, with some half-dozen of our own men who were passing the spot at the time, were literally blown to pieces, while another three or four dozen were lying strewn about the mouth of the dug-out with fearful wounds, nearly all of them about the legs and lower part of the body. There was a rush of the survivors for the steps of the dug-out itself, and the staff, endeavouring to make their way out to discover what really had happened, found their egress completely blocked by
