Lieutenant James Leach and Sergeant John Hogan, 2nd Battalion the Manchester Regiment. Lieutenant Leach had only received his commission a few days before he won the Victoria Cross on October 29. "When I joined the Manchesters," he said in an interview, "there were only six officers and forty-five men, whereas the proper strength of the battalion was 30 officers and 1,100 men. The regiment had been badly cut up at Le Cateau and La Bassée. On joining the regiment I was immediately put in command of a company which was in an advanced trench near Festubert.[74] The trench was large enough to hold thirty-five men; it was about 150 yards from the main trench, and 120 yards from the German trenches.
"At seven o'clock on the morning of 29th October I had just started to have my breakfast, when a man to the right of me shouted, 'Look out, sir, look out; they're coming,' and began firing as fast as he could. I looked over the parapet, and saw about 250 of the enemy with fixed bayonets approaching the trench at the double, firing as they came on, and making a peculiar wailing noise. Before the Germans reached the trench we shot down something like 150 of them. With only such a short distance to cross from their trenches to ours, about 100 of the enemy managed to reach our trench and jump into it. By sheer weight of numbers they carried the trench, and killed about twelve of my men.
[Illustration: How Lieutenant Leach and Sergeant Hogan recaptured a Trench from the Germans.
(_From the picture by F. Matania. By permission of The Sphere._)]
"At nine o'clock I called up the communication trench, and asked how far the enemy had got, and found they were occupying three of the four traverses.[75] When I went up again by myself two hours later, I found the Germans were occupying all the four traverses. Well, I thought, if we leave it much longer they will be down the communication trenches into the main trench.
"The same evening we heard we were to be relieved by the Gurkhas, and I felt it would be rather bad on my part to leave the recovery of the trench to them. I therefore determined about two o'clock to regain the trench before dark. Calling for volunteers, Sergeant Hogan and ten others came forward, and we began to crawl up the communication trench. I fired anywhere with my revolver, only exposing my hand, with the intention of pushing back the enemy along the trench as far as we could. The idea was to force them to run back to their own trenches, so that we could shoot them down as they went.