The first days of May found me with but little work to do.

I spent some of my time running up into the Salient and hearing talk of preparations for a withdrawal of our line to a smaller horseshoe around Ypres. This was to be done as soon as all was ready for the move, and the utmost secrecy enveloped the operations.

I saw Rex Benson, of the 9th Lancers, who was acting temporarily as liaison officer with the French troops along the canal north of Ypres. Rex said the French had made but little progress towards the Pilkem ridge and General Putz had apparently decided to concentrate his position and give up open assault for the present.

The Hun howitzer fire was so fierce along the roads when I skirted Ypres on May 1st that I decided to desist visiting the Salient. In short, I got "cold feet" about the Ypres roads, and decided to do my joy-riding in other directions.

Romer Williams, of the 4th D.G.'s, and I went to St. Omer on the 2nd and brought out a couple of Romer's Red Cross friends, one a San Franciscan, named Sherman, at whose billet we had found marvellous cocktails. We all dined at General Mullens' headquarters, a gay party.

As we were feasting, the Huns in front of Ypres were up to more devilment. They let loose a heavy gas attack on the evening of the 2nd and made the British trenches south of St. Julien untenable. Our men retired, but the gas hung stationary for a few moments, and prevented an immediate German advance. This fortunate pause gave time for a concentration of all our guns on the spot. When the gas had dispersed sufficiently to allow an advance by the enemy, our gunners threw a barrage de feu across the German front as it emerged from St. Julien and the little wood to the west of it, and effectually stopped the way. Meantime, our men had regained their trenches.

The 2nd Cavalry Division, dismounted, was called up as support during this attack. To reach the trenches into which they were ordered they found it necessary to advance across an enemy barrage de feu. The 4th Hussars and 5th Lancers were the regiments engaged. For a time it seemed they would be badly cut up, but luckily they got through the curtain of shells with only forty killed.

So some cavalry units had been thrown into the actual line, after all.

On the 3rd the 1st Cavalry Division moved back to its previous winter billets, the Headquarters Staff again repairing to the La Nieppe chÂteau.

The Huns attacked our Ypres line all day on the 4th, but with no success. That night the evacuation of the extreme eastern section of the Salient was carried out without serious casualty.

The enemy patrols that poked through the Polygon Wood at daybreak on the 4th, and discovered the British retirement to a line further west, must indeed have been surprised.

The fighting of the previous ten days had cost the Allies over thirty square miles of ground and more than 20,000 casualties, but the British Army had undoubtedly gained in morale, nevertheless. Colonials and Territorials, as well as old line regiments filled with new reserve men, had fought shoulder to shoulder with the veterans of Le Cateau and the Aisne, every unit gaining strength unconsciously as each contingent rose in the other's estimation. Mutual admiration and mutual confidence had welded the Army all the more closely together.

On a call at 5th Corps Headquarters at Abele, west of Poperinghe, I saw a couple of what appeared to be divers' helmets. These were loaded into a car, with a good-sized roll of rubber tubing and a homely pair of bellows attached to each of the grotesque pieces of headgear.

Curious, I asked a "Q" officer, standing near by, just how this paraphernalia was to be used.

"People get strange ideas about fighting gas," he said. "These outfits were designed and forwarded to us to be sent up front, so up front I am sending them. They are provided to allow some of our men, say about 3 in every 10,000, so far as present supply goes, to stay in the gas-filled trenches while some pals with the bellows pump good air to them through a few hundred feet of hose.

"If the gas area should be of considerable extent the chap with the bellows would soon be pumping chlorine into his fellow-Tommy, and die pumping at that, or else take to the woods and let the diver himself get what air he could find.

"Many accidents might befall the tube. A Hun might sit on it. I hate to think of myself, squatting in a trench with one of those things over my head, praying for air, with the bellows man pumping his heart out trying to get ozone through a rubber tube on top of which some fat Boche had plumped, while he potted away at one or the other of us.

"A shell, too, would have an interesting time with such a tube. Imagine the chap in the helmet hollering, 'Pump away, you lazy beggar, I'm not getting enough air to keep a flea alive,' and all the good old oxygen pouring out of a jagged hole in the bally pipe, hundreds of feet from him.

"Then, suppose a man, coming up before daylight, got his foot caught in that length of tube," he continued enthusiastically—but I realised I had started something I couldn't stop, and fled.

On May 5th I found E. F. Lumsden, of the A.S.C., an old friend with a passion for car repair of all sorts, who had charge of the lorries and motor workshops attached to the 7th Brigade Royal Garrison Artillery Ammunition Park. His lot were in Estaires. I turned my car over to them for rejuvenation while I hied myself to London to purchase an alarmingly large collection of parts with which to assist the somewhat extensive rebuilding Lumsden had gleefully planned.

I was back with a heavy load of hardware and empty purse by the night of May 7th, and by midnight on the 8th left Estaires with my chariot, which was in a greatly chastened mood.

While I was on leave in England the troopers of the 1st Cavalry Division had spent their nights in the Ypres Salient digging reserve line trenches and making barbed wire entanglements. Ypres on fire, the trench line alight with flares and the flash of constant shell-bursts, made this work more spectacular than pleasant. Once or twice a shell fell sufficiently near the troopers to wound one or two. One Black Maria unfortunately dropped among a squadron of the 18th Hussars, killing two of them and wounding a couple of dozen more.

Lunching on the 8th with a gunners' mess on the Laventie front, I learned of a big "push" ordered at dawn on the 9th. The Auber ridge was to be attacked from the south-west by two Indian Divisions, and from the north-west by the 8th Division and the 7th Division, with the Northumbrian Territorial Division and the newly arrived West Riding Territorial Division somewhere about. Something like 120,000 men were thus to be engaged. The Canadian Division was in reserve, in addition, and the 9th Division, the first of the "K" troops to reach the Front, was expected by rail that night.

The 6th Division, in the Bois Grenier area, was ready and eager to push forward toward Lille if the Auber ridge attack proved successful.

Instructions had been given, in anticipation of any misunderstandings which might tend to lead to another fiasco like the battle of Neuve Chapelle. Orders were issued that troops in certain areas were to push on and not delay, because telephonic communication had not been established. The order of the day asked the troops to "break a hole in the enemy's line," and assured the attacking Divisions that the whole Army was behind, ready to deal sledge-hammer blows on the broken German front.

My gunner friends confidently expected to sleep in Lille on the night of the 9th, and proceeded jocosely to mark on a map of that city the houses each one chose as his billet. Roads to Lille had been selected for the ammunition columns, and orders given which would ensure a supply of shells that far forward, in case the attack "got through."

All was excitement when I left that front in the small hours of the morning of the 9th, and greatly would I have loved to stay and see the Auber Ridge attack at daybreak. But at early morning light on Sunday, May 9th, the 1st Cavalry Division, placed under the orders of General Plumer, who had taken General Smith-Dorrien's place as the General Officer commanding the 2nd Army, was once more to be sent to Ypres.

Things had not gone well in the Salient on the 8th. The 5th Corps, then under General Allenby, who had been promoted from Cavalry Corps, was composed of the 4th, 27th and 28th Divisions. These troops had been driven from their first-line trenches by a strenuous German attack, and had fallen back to the next line with heavy casualties.

The 2nd Cavalry Brigade had been rushed early on the 9th into the reserve trenches east of Ypres, and were in readiness from Potijze south to the Menin Road. The 1st Cavalry Brigade and the 9th Cavalry Brigade were near Vlamertinghe, west of Ypres, waiting orders.

The Huns had begun a ferocious onslaught on that perfect Sunday morning, and the roar of battle around Ypres drowned, in our ears, the noise of the 1st Army attack towards Aubers.

That 9th of May was to see bitter fighting on many fronts. The enemy attack on the Ypres Salient, and our "push" against the Auber ridge, were pregnant with bloody work, but away to the south, in front of Arras, the French Army was commencing the second day of the biggest attack it had yet planned since the winter mud had limited the fighting to trench warfare.

Five hundred thousand men and 2,000 guns were hammering at the German front, in an effort to break through to Douai, and though it was too early to expect a detailed report of the onslaught, word had come that the soldiers of France had won through in three places.

On the Russian front the German arms were crowned with success on that day, in a gigantic conflict, and the day before saw the sinking of the Lusitania and the sacrifice of its load of women and children.

One seemed to live many hours in a few minutes in those May days. All-engrossed with the work in hand, we were none the less anxious to hear of the great movements about us, in which our interests were not less keen than in the fighting in our own immediate area.

The new British line around Ypres ran from the French right, 2,000 yards east of the Yser-Ypres Canal, and about the same distance north of St. Jean, east for a mile or so to a homestead dubbed the Canadian Farm, then south-east across the Ypres-St. Julien road, and across another road that previously had served as a secondary route to Passchendaele.

From that point the trenches led south, passing to the west of Verlorenhoek, a town on the Ypres-Zonnebeke road. South again, and a little east, they crossed the Ypres-Roulers railway, skirted the western and the southern shores of the Bellewaarde Lake, took in the grounds of the ruined Hooge chÂteau and the eastern fringe of the woods that surrounded it, passed east of Hooge, and thus reached the famous Ypres-Menin road.

On went the line, winding snakelike through the eastern edge of the Sanctuary Wood, south of the Menin Road. Here the Salient reached its furthermost eastern extremity.

Then began a south-westerly trend, less than a mile in front of Zillebeke, reaching Zaartsteen before crossing the Ypres-Comines railway and later the Ypres-Comines canal.

From the canal the trenches ran more west than south to St. Eloi, then still on to the westward, until they circled south, away from Ypres, in front of Vierstraat, Kemmel and Wolverghem successively. There they faced, then passed Messines, reached the Ploegsteert Wood, crossed the River Lys and bent round ArmentiÈres, on their way through the Auber and Neuve Chapelle area, to the Festubert and La BassÉe fronts.

Early morning on that eventful Sunday found me driving General de Lisle and Hardress Lloyd to Ypres, straight through the devastated old city, out of the Menin gate, over the Menin bridge and on up the Zonnebeke Road as far as Potijze.

From the railway crossing at the western edge of Ypres, past the smashed cathedral of St. Martin, round the ruins of the Cloth Hall, through the Grande Place, and down the Rue de Menin, dead horses and men lined the way.

Ypres, which I had seen shelled so heavily time after time without its semblance of a city being destroyed, was at last indescribably in ruins. The slender pinnacles at the ends of the Cloth Hall still stood, and the tower itself had not fallen, though it had been so riddled it seemed in imminent danger of collapse. The tall torn tower of St. Martin's, near by, was also standing.

I found great difficulty in picking my way through the square, past shell-holes, piles of paving blocks, and heaps of dead horses. At one end of the Grande Place a howitzer shell had burst directly on an artillery limber, the horses and men being piled indiscriminately together, every one instantly killed. They lay in a heap on the broken stones of the square.

Our previous brewery headquarters was levelled to the ground, and the house where we had slept when last in Ypres was smashed out of all recognition.

Shells were falling in Ypres as we went through it. Across the Menin bridge the road, once a broad highway, had been narrowed to a mere path by pile on pile of shell-strewn bricks and stones. The houses were one by one completely disappearing, as though the space they occupied was required for other purposes, and the demolition of each one of them was a preconceived part of a plan of extinction of all signs of habitation.

Dead horses in dozens along the way lay close to the wheel track. We passed an ambulance, its front portion torn away by a shell, and then the remnants of a supply wagon, smashed to matchwood.

As we sped on, as fast as the continual obstructions and deep shell-holes would allow, shells fell behind us, screeching overhead every few seconds with strange, weird, discordant notes, culminating in a reverberating bang! that seemed thrown back at us by the high walls across the moat.

The dozens of dead horses became scores as we pushed on. Some fields by the road were literally covered with them.

A signals corps man told me that at one point his orders for dark night journeys across those fields were as follows: "Go down the hedge till you reach the ditch, turn right, and go toward the big pile of dead horses until you come to the gap in the next hedge." Those instructions could be easily followed on the blackest night, if one's olfactory nerves were in working order.

Every breath of air seemed to our unaccustomed nostrils to be charged with noisome smells.

As we approached Potijze the infantry fire grew less in volume. The Hun onslaught, the first of five distinct attacks to be pushed home by the Germans that day, had failed, and the breathing space was the more heavily punctuated by the howitzer shells for half an hour, as if in a special spleen of disappointment.

Most of the British guns had been withdrawn from the Salient and to the west of the canal. Two batteries of 18-pounders left near Potijze were firing with the valour of one hundred as we came up. But field-guns of light calibre, firing shrapnel, have less voice in an argument than the heavy howitzers with their 6-inch, 8-inch, or 14-inch high explosive shells. The Huns' howitzers on that Ypres front must have outnumbered our heavy ordnance by at least twenty to one that Sunday morning.

Long straggling strings of wounded soldiers trickled past on the Potijze road, making their way painfully around Ypres to the north-west, for to linger long on the Menin road, over which we had come, was to court sure death.

General de Lisle stopped the car not far from the Potijze chÂteau, and he and Hardress Lloyd walked through a field to the dug-out in which General Mullens had established 2nd Cavalry Brigade Headquarters.

I turned the car and backed it between two walls of what once were dwelling-houses. Sitting close to the bottom of the wall, beside the car, I counted shell intervals while waiting. From two to three shells burst near the Potijze cross-roads every minute, but by far the greater number of Hun projectiles went on, over my head, to the Menin bridge and Ypres.

A good-sized bough from a tree above dropped on my head, and a piece of shell casing, quite hot, struck my foot as it fell, spent, beside me.

For ten minutes splinters swept the roadway continuously, and the stream of wounded ceased to pour by until the fury of the sudden bombardment had spent itself. The constant shock of concussion was nerve-racking.

After a quarter of an hour the shells fell less frequently, though odd ones struck the road at intervals.

Behind the Verlorenhoek-Hooge line was a smaller Salient, called the G.H.Q. line. It served as a support position, and between it and the canal were whole colonies of dug-outs.

Much of the G.H.Q. line was so situated that a parapet of sandbags, in full sight of the German observers, made it a frequent target. On some days during the fighting that followed the casualties in the G.H.Q. line rivalled those in the front trenches. It was never a popular resting place, and was often the subject of much vituperation.

General de Lisle and Lloyd returned to the car, and nearer Ypres made another halt to visit the reserve dug-outs in the fields toward the St. Jean road.

"Take good cover, President," said the General, as he started across a shell-torn meadow.

Easier said than done, I thought.

The lee of a house wall sheltered an empty biscuit-tin, on which I perched, under a lean-to of rough boards. The sky showed a fairy blue through hundreds of holes in the sheet-iron roof of the rudely constructed shed, evidence that a bursting shell above had "scattered" splendidly.

In spite of shell interludes I had one or two interesting chats with passers-by. A hospital corps sergeant told me the Huns shelled the Zonnebeke road, beside which we were chatting, every time they saw a transport on it.

"They give it hell when something moves over it," he said impressively. "Just let us bring an ambulance up here in the daytime, and see them get busy, the devils."

"That's nice," said I. "Do you think they could see my car when it went up to Potijze?"

"Sure," he replied with conviction. "Sure. If they haven't shelled you yet they will, all right, don't you worry."

He left me cogitating, as he strode off whistling, evidently unaware he had put anything but comforting ideas in my head.

All those who came from "up there" agreed as to one thing—the storm of howitzer-shells made one's chance of living through a "turn in the trenches" extremely slim. Many men were undeniably demoralised by it.

"The few of my poor chaps that are left," a 28th Division subaltern told me, "seem to have the idea their number is up. They keep saying that if they don't get it to-day they'll sure get it to-morrow. Hardly any of them have much hope of getting out alive. I keep trying to hearten 'em, but it's rotten work. Every time I rip out something intended to be cheerful along comes a Jack Johnson and blows up a whole bally section of trench, burying alive those it don't kill. Then the poor beggars alongside just nod at each other and say: 'You and me next, Bill,' and what in hell can I tell 'em?

"Why in the deuce we don't have more guns up here I'd like to know. It does get sickening to be shelled, and shelled, and shelled, day and night, and hear so little of the same sort of stuff going over their way. Damn the German guns, anyway."

I sympathised with him, and told him so.

"I would like to see what de Lisle would do if he was running the guns," I told him. "He would send some hell of his own making over to those Huns if he was doing it, from what I have heard him say."

Odd prophetic fragment of comfort, that. Three days thereafter de Lisle was given command of the whole Verlorenhoek-Hooge front and all the artillery east of the canal, a territory which he soon had "stiff with guns." In spite of the preponderance of the Germans in heavy ordnance our gunners gave the enemy good packages of the medicine with which our hammered troops had been dosed for so many weary days.

The run back over the Menin Bridge and through Ypres safely accomplished, we visited the headquarters of General Snow, commanding 28th Division. While waiting there a Hun howitzer shell ambled lazily over my head and exploded a couple of hundred yards beyond, throwing up a great cloud of black smoke.

"Enemy airmen spotted this little lot," said a passing "red-hat." "Warm time coming for Snow."

His anxiety was unnecessary, however, for the next shell went much further over us, and another two further still, as if searching for moving troops far behind the line.

The 3rd Cavalry Division troopers, loaded in motor-buses, went Ypres-ward during the afternoon. General Sir Julian Byng had taken Allenby's place at Cavalry Corps, and General Briggs had been given command of the 3rd Cavalry Division in Byng's place. The British Army contained no finer soldier than Briggs. This left the 1st Cavalry Brigade without a G.O.C., as General Meakin, who had been appointed to that command, was in England on sick leave. Consequently Colonel "Tommy" Pitman, of the 11th Hussars, was placed in temporary command of the 1st Brigade. Pitman, like Briggs, was a born leader of men—a tower of strength in himself.

Once during the afternoon my work took me to Ypres, but not beyond it. A fresh attack was on, and the Boches were sweeping the Menin Bridge and the road beyond with shrapnel.

Even Macfarlane's intrepid motor-cyclists could no longer go over it with their signal corps messages; but were compelled to dismount, leave their motor-bikes in Ypres, and proceed on foot to Potijze by a roundabout route through the fields. Those cyclists generally used a road long after it had been given up as impassable by everyone else, and when they at last abandoned it as too dangerous for use it was indeed time, in their parlance, "to give it a miss."

Our 2nd Brigade troops were under intermittent shell-fire all that day, but came through with unusual good fortune. One shell lit in a group of 18th Hussars, killed five and wounded eight, but the other units escaped with extraordinarily few casualties.

At the headquarters of General Bulfin, Commanding 28th Division, Lord Loch, who was G.S.O. 1, on General Bulfin's Staff, gave us a very welcome tea.

From one of the 28th Division Staff I learned that the 4th, 27th and 28th Divisions had been through a more terrible time in the Salient than we had known. Snow's Division, the 27th, were terribly depleted in numbers. "Not many men left, and very few officers indeed," was the sober way Snow had spoken of his lot that day.

The five heavy attacks of the 9th, in spite of the battered condition of the heroic men who faced them, resulted in no real gains and the Germans suffered severe losses.

We sought eagerly for news of the British attack along the Auber ridge. Early in the morning word had come that the 8th Division had made a splendid beginning by taking the German first line trenches in front of them. In the afternoon we heard that the 4th Corps "got on" well, but the Indian Corps and 1st Corps were held up by machine-gun fire and had made no progress. A further attack was to be made at 4 p.m. on the 10th. On the 11th, the G.H.Q. information summary remarked, laconically, that there was "nothing to report from the 1st Army Front." So the big attack, of which my gunner friends along the Fromelle Road had such hopes, had fizzled out.

Weeks afterwards I heard the full story from the lips of men who were in the front of the fighting, but our task in Ypres was growing hourly sufficiently absorbing, so that the whys and wherefores of Rawlinson's failure to break through were of less interest than the question of repelling the German attack on the Salient.

As dusk drew on the conflagrations in Ypres lit up the eastern sky. Our night headquarters were in a chÂteau not far west of the unfortunate town.

Wounded still straggled back in small groups, and ambulances arrived every few minutes at a dressing station hard by the gates of our chÂteau.

Watching those ambulances unload made me proud to be an Anglo-Saxon. The men were magnificent in their incomparable morale. Many a smiling face hid teeth set hard in pain. Many a Tommy knows not only the inestimable value of keeping a stout heart to help himself through, but the immeasurably greater treasure of an ample store of cheery words and light-hearted jokes wherewith to lift a comrade from pain-racked despondency.

Broken bodies, broken limbs, and many a broken head were there in plenty, but one looked far to find a broken spirit.

Before we went to sleep, good news came from the French. All the way from Loos south to Lens, it said, and on through Thelus to Arras, the German first-line trenches had been captured, save in two places. On the 10th, the French reported having taken 2,000 prisoners and ten guns. In spite of all, the succeeding days' reports whittled down the final result to a tactical success, not a strategical one. The break in the German line was made good by the enemy in short order, and soon Gaul and Teuton were facing each other much as they had done, previously, and the inch-by-inch battles of the Labyrinth were soaking the ground of France's black country with French and German blood.

The big French attack and the British "push" had equally failed to smash the German line.

On our front British soldiers were to continue to show that their line could hold as solidly as the Hun line had held to the south, in spite of the hell of howitzer-fire that was daily to be let loose in the Salient.

Rocked to sleep by the earth-tremble of bursting tons of high explosive, day-dawn on May 10th seemed to come the next moment after my head had hit the floor which served me as a pillow.

Before seven o'clock in the morning I was again in the Salient and once more under shell-fire.

Taking Colonel Home through Ypres and over the Menin bridge, we were not long in reaching Potijze.

The weather was perfect, hundreds of small birds hopping about the roadways and twittering excitedly, as if protesting to each other against the continual coming of the shells.

Behind a ruined house near the Potijze crossroads, I made a lucky discovery. Someone had built a comfy little dug-out, six feet by four and nearly three feet deep, into which I at once repaired. Its earthen walls were reinforced by heavy planks, and a roof of earth-covered timbers was edged with barrels and sacks of bricks and mortar. Ponchos lined the inside of the walls, and the floor was deep with straw. On a shelf stood the remains of a ham bone and a tin half full of marmalade.

With thirty to forty jarring explosions in the vicinity every minute, this habitation was little short of ideal, save for the smell, which was fierce in its intensity and persistence.

The earth of the open spaces near by was thrown into yellow and brown heaps by the hundreds of howitzer shells that had rained on them for days. Dozens of dead horses, scattered about, offended the eye and polluted the air.

A detachment of troopers, bent on rendering the trenches of the near by G.H.Q. line a more safe shelter, had been spied by the Hun gunners, who for hours sent a continual shower of shells over them.

I had not waited long before I found I was not the only occupant of my shelter. My companions bit me surreptitiously, leaving red blotches which burned irritatingly.

I sat in the open air for a few moments, deciding there was not sufficient room in the dug-out for my small but persistent comrades and myself, but a big shell landed near and sent such a spattering horde of splinters all around that I ducked back underground and took my chance with the less serious wounds of the busy little dug-out folk, who seemed half starved, in spite of the ham bone and marmalade that had been left to them.

A couple of worried, hungry mongrel dogs came nosing about fearfully, heads cocked inquisitively when they caught sight of me. I gave them the bone and was thanked by a series of tailwags from each.

A Hun shell set fire to a building not far distant, and soon immense clouds of black and saffron smoke were rolling heavenwards.

Many shells came close to where I was tucked away, one throwing a cart load of dÉbris over my car, but none of them in the least disturbing the tranquillity of my snug quarters.

Returning through Ypres, we found the Menin Road and bridge had been further hammered since we had come over it. At one or two points it was almost impassable for a car. The carcass of a dead horse had been blown right across the path, so that I was compelled to pass over part of it.

Houses were smoking on all sides, and red flames rose skyward in several quarters of the town.

A solitary old woman in black was picking her way tortuously past the dead and over the tumbled piles of brick and stone. She was, we thought, the last survivor of the civil population.

General Adeney, of the 12th Brigade, called at 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters and told me of the heavy shelling on the front that his brigade had held. The signal wire from his headquarters to that of his Division was cut by shell-fire fifty-five times in one day. His men had gone through a terrible time, but had stood it magnificently. General Adeney had wide experience with the Hun gas, and assured us its effects could be greatly nullified if care was taken to follow out the instructions as to the use of the respirators and face-masks, which had been issued to each man whose duty took him into the Salient.

The 2nd Cavalry Brigade went from the G.H.Q. line to the front position during the evening, but were relieved by the 1st Cavalry Brigade before the next morning. The 1st Brigade spent the day in dug-outs in a little wood near the Ypres-Roulers Railway, close to the trenches. Shell-fire had cost the 2nd Brigade thirteen killed and fifty-four wounded during its occupancy of the G.H.Q. line.

The 9th Cavalry Brigade reported itself "quite comfortable" in splendid dug-outs near Wieltje, but the shells wounded four of its officers and eighteen of its men, nevertheless.

From the windows of our headquarters chÂteau the fires of Ypres could be seen burning brightly all night, a red splash on the inky black of the horizon. Bursting shells and the flash of our guns never ceased. Bright stars dotted the dark canopy overhead, and brilliant trench-flares rose and fell in graceful arcs. The wonderful, ever-changing sight and the continual diapason of the heavy explosives was awe-inspiring.

Early morning usually came with a lull in the gun-fire on both sides, unless an attack was in progress. We hurried through breakfast on the 11th, and lost no time in getting away for Potijze.

General de Lisle, Major "Bertie" Fisher, of the 17th Lancers, who had joined de Lisle's Staff as G.S.O. 2 (in place of Major Fitzgerald, promoted to G.S.O. 1 of the 2nd Cavalry Division), and Captain Hardress Lloyd were my passengers.

The rumph! r-r-rumph! of itinerant Black Marias told us that German hate still held against shattered Ypres. As we approached the town one or two heavy explosions were followed by a cloud of dust and smoke where the shells had fallen on a building already a heap of dÉbris and scattered its remains high in the air.

At the railway crossing west of Ypres several newly made shell-chasms made me pick my path warily. All the way to the Grande Place shell-holes and gathering piles of rubbish and timbers made progress difficult.

The space in front of the cathedral was knee-deep in loose paving blocks and stones.

As we turned the corner of the Cloth Hall, and could see the battered square, our sight was arrested by brilliant sheets of scarlet flame edged black, that shot across the Rue de Menin ahead of us.

The bright morning sun and blue, cloudless sky above, the grey and white ruins on every hand, and the blood-red, leaping, straining, struggling patch of angry flame that roared in our faces as we drew near to it, made a picture that would have delighted the heart of an artist.

I stopped the car.

The General at first counselled rushing through the fire, but I dreaded the result. Even should we have dashed past unscathed, the thought of the petrol in the car made me hesitate.

Then, beyond the conflagration, we saw that a house at the western approach to the Menin bridge had been knocked over by a shell, and so fallen that it completely blocked the road. Half a hundred men must work for hours before the Menin bridge would once more be open for traffic, though fortunately the bridge itself was undamaged.

Reversing the car and regaining the Grande Place, I threaded my way past deep holes in the pavÉ, and cautiously clambered over piles of dÉbris as we sought another route eastward. Along a street where desolation reigned supreme we went, until we reached the eastern moat wall. Turning north, we sought an outlet on the St. Jean road.

Pushing over great fallen timbers, nail-studded and threatening a puncture at every revolution of the wheels, over, by and into holes in the paved road, it seemed impossible the car could surmount and pass the mounds of wreckage and paving-blocks that filled the way.

Over the railway we crawled, and to the very northern edge of Ypres. Just as we were congratulating ourselves on having won through, in spite of apparently insurmountable difficulties, a monster shell-cavity, thirty feet in diameter, and so deep as to be absolutely impassable for the car, opened in front of us.

The road was wide, but the shell had fallen in its centre, heaping the earth and stone at the edges of the gaping crater until it blocked the street from side to side.

General de Lisle and his two companions dismounted and proceeded on foot, instructing me to "be careful and get home safely."

Heading the way I had come was a task of some magnitude. Pneumatic tyres were not made to traverse shell-torn roads covered with glass, nails, and sharp bits of iron and stone, but my trusty Dunlops did not fail me.

In the square I stopped to get a photograph of a fire that was enveloping the houses at the back of the cathedral. Every building in the district was burning, some smouldering and smoking threateningly, while the flames raged fiercely from top to bottom of others standing near.

As I pulled up, a fearful crash came from the Menin bridge not far behind me, the shock of the concussion almost throwing me down. Giving up all idea of procuring pictures under such circumstances, I ignominiously fled as fast as it was safe to go.

Passing the cathedral, I saw a fine collie dog, his tail between his legs, slinking along furtively. I called him, dismounting from the car and trying to induce him to come to me, but he was scared so badly he only ran the faster at my approach.

In the western edge of Ypres a worn, drawn-faced Belgian, with a hunted look in his eyes, was slowly and carefully shoving a wheelbarrow, on which was a rude pallet. Stretched upon it lay the wasted form of a frail woman, close-swathed in as much bedding as the method of conveyance would allow. Her skin was wax-white, her wide eyes large and lustrous. She had not sufficient strength to prevent her feet from trailing the ground. An aged crone shuffled beside the sick woman, on her face a picture of agonised fear painful to see.

Big Hun guns were searching for little British ones not far away, and at every detonation the poor old woman jumped nervously.

An offer of assistance met with no response, as if they were past all capability of communication. The horrors they must have gone through for weeks in some cellar in that stricken town baffle imagination.

They were undoubtedly the last of the residents of Ypres to leave the town alive. If others remained, it was but to be buried under the falling walls of their hiding places, or to meet a worse fate in the flames that were raging from one end of the city to the other.

Vlamertinghe received a sharp shelling that forenoon, and a few minutes afterward I took General de Lisle through the town to the headquarters of General Wilson of the 4th Division. As we ran through Vlamertinghe, Tommies were busy sweeping the roadway clear of dÉbris thrown about by the shells five minutes before.

When at General Bulfin's Headquarters estaminet a quarter of an hour later, I saw Hun shrapnel again begin bursting in twos over Vlamertinghe, which was gradually becoming an unhealthy locality.

The clear air brought out dozens of aeroplanes, which kept the anti-aircraft guns busy. The Germans sent up a couple of weird "sausages"—anchored observation balloons of peculiar shape.

The amount of ammunition used in the continuous shelling of the trench line was stupendous.

On one run toward Ypres I passed the "Princess Pat's" (Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry), fresh from the 27th Division trenches, and on their way to a rest in billets. They were indeed a sturdy lot. All forenoon the Huns shelled our front line from the Menin Road to the north as it passed the Hooge ChÂteau and circled the Bellewaarde Lake. Wounded men poured back through Ypres from the Front, marvelling that they had escaped death in the trenches, and wondering still more that they had not been blown to atoms as they trudged back along the deadly Menin Road.

A wounded trooper of the 11th Hussars reported his regiment unpleasantly situated in bad dug-outs in a wood, between the Ypres-Roulers Railway and the Bellewaarde Lake. The dug-outs were not of sufficient size to accommodate the whole of the 11th, and when a detachment of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders claimed shelter therein as well, the congestion became dangerous. The Hun shells burst immediately over the dug-outs, and some casualties had occurred before morning dawned. So little accommodation seemed available that one squadron of the 11th had been sent back to the G.H.Q. line, where it had been badly hammered by howitzer fire for hour after hour as the morning passed.

Romer Williams and I walked from our chÂteau to a "Mother" gun, concealed under a screen of dry branches in a near-by farmyard. The big 9·2 howitzer was throwing its 290-pound projectiles, filled with lyddite, into the Hun trenches in front of Hooge, nearly 9,000 yards distant. The five-mile journey was accomplished by each shell in 35 seconds, a rate of more than 500 miles per hour. Dodging a shell which was coming at such speed would be something of a feat.

Yet, standing directly behind the breech, we could distinctly see the 9·2 shell as it left the muzzle and started on its sinister errand.

For so huge an engine of war its paraphernalia was simple. The howitzer stood on a platform built into the farmyard. Rows of shells, each a load for four men, lay in a ditch behind it. On a log, under a tall tree, sat the captain gunner, by his side a non-com. busy figuring out mathematical equations, and another poring over a large-scale map. With his back to the tree crouched a Royal Flying Corps man, his receiver to his ear, and an elaborate box of wireless telegraphic tricks beside him. Across the road a slender pole, a score of feet in height, completed his wireless installation.

"Fire!" said the captain, sharply.

Flash! bang! "Mother" recoiled with a shock and returned leisurely. Not a big noise or a very trying one on the ears of those near by, unless in front of the "business end." The crew stood close at hand as each round was fired.

Before an unsophisticated onlooker would imagine the great shell had reached its destination, the wireless man, listening attentively to the message from an aeroplane observer high over the Huns, and out of our sight, sang out "150 yards over."

A cabalistic sequence of numbers was shouted in staccato tones by one of the non-coms, repeated by a man at the breech, and flash! bang! went "Mother" again.

"Well placed. Right into them," said the wireless operator, as the approving message was ticked from his fellow in the 'plane.

Flash! bang! the work went on, comforting the battered men in our own trenches, and harrying the Germans in theirs.

"Had nine direct hits on their trenches yesterday," said the captain gunner, "and have got the range pretty well to-day. Managed to get a couple into one of the German batteries this morning, too." And he grinned.

If the men who made the shells could have known how much heart every 9·2 projectile put into the brave boys that faced the Hun trenches, weary to distraction of everlasting German shelling, and little return thereto, they would have been justly proud of their handiwork.

A "Mother" shell was a fine tonic for those who were behind it, "when it popped."

On the night of the 11th the 1st and 9th Brigades "took over" the parts of the line held by the 27th Division and most of that held by the 28th. Up to that time the troopers had been only in reserve or support, yet so heavy was the Hun gun-fire in the Salient that our Division had lost one officer killed and seventeen wounded, and the casualty list among the men was but few short of one hundred.

De Lisle was given command of a stretch of line reaching from near the Bellewaarde Lake to the Wieltje-St. Julien road, and 2,500 28th Division men and all the guns east of the Yser-Ypres Canal were placed under him. He at once planned to throw several additional batteries into the Salient, and gave orders which would result in a shell-surprise for the Huns. Every time the German gunners started to shell our trenches, the German trenches were to be deluged with a half an hour of concentrated shell-fire from all de Lisle's field batteries, his 6-inch howitzer battery, and the single 60-pounder gun that had been allotted to him.

The day closed with the repulse of the last of three sanguine enemy attacks that had been launched since morning, two of which had gained a foothold in the British line, only to have it, in each case, torn from their grasp by costly counter-attacks.

The Ypres-Poperinghe road was filled with troops marching westward. "To what lot do these men belong?" I asked General Mullens, as we stood watching the passing columns.

"They are of the Northumberland Brigade," said Mullens. "I am told that but 900 of them are left out of more than 5,000. Another Brigade went into the Salient 5,500 strong a fortnight ago, and has come out to-day numbering but 950."

I went to bed by the bright light of burning Ypres, which made every tree cast flickering shadows to try the nerves of the men who tramped up in the cold darkness to share the morrow's battle, or trudged back to billets to sink into the torpor of extreme exhaustion, until in their turn they should again face the shattering shell blasts.

May 12th was comparatively a quiet day. The wind had changed, and Hun gas attacks were impossible until it again swung round to the east.

I told Captain Francis Grenfell, of the 9th Lancers, about the "Mother" gun not far away, and we strolled down where it was quartered just in time to watch it fire a score of rounds at a German battery which was in action at the bend of the Ypres-Comines Canal near Hollebeke.

A second 9·2 gun had arrived in the night and taken up quarters in an adjoining farm. It had been doing good work near Brielen, but was "spotted" by a German air-scout and "found" by the enemy's guns. One man killed and several wounded by a German shell decided the gunner in command to "make a get-away" from the discovered position.

The 3rd Cavalry Division troops were put under de Lisle's command in addition to those of his own Division and the odd brigades of the 28th Division.

face p. 218