Light grew and grew. Fitful gleams of sunshine danced across the plain. More cavalry came, squadron after squadron, wheeling into line on the fields just below. But they made no movement forward, those wheeling squadrons. Peter saw them through his glasses—dismounting, loosening girths, fume of their cigarettes blue in the air.

Came one English aeroplane, drifting aimlessly across the sky.

Walking wounded came, trudging painfully across the fields, singly and two by two, arms dangling, heads bandaged. (There were no steel helmets in those early days.)

Came a gray company of prisoners, capless, weaponless; fell out; squatted on their hunkers among the root-fields. Came a dozen peasant-children, sprung somehow to life; wrenched up roots from the field; pelted the captives as they squatted. The company fell in again; trudged off towards BÉthune; followed by the spitting, cursing children. (And there were many “gentlemen” in England still abed that morning!)

Came, towards noon, down the road from Sailly, long brown columns of infantry, guns and horses; marching towards Noyelles. The Northdown Division! Gun-range away behind the grimy remnants who were even then bombing out the cellars in Loos village beyond the skyline.... But from Beuvry to Annequin the roads were bare. And on the left of the attack, round the Hohenzollern Redoubt, in the Chalk Quarries, at the foot of Fosse Eight, men fought unsupported, died cursing the chance that was never taken, the help that never came.

“The situation with regard to the Southdown Division is still obscure at the time of drawing up my report,” reads official history of a fortnight later.