and on through the night, under the glare of flares and the long-drawn punishment of the shell fire, until the following day brought with the dawn fresh supports for a renewal of the struggle. The battered fragments of the first attacking battalions were withdrawn, often with corporals for company leaders, and lieutenants or captains commanding battalions whose full remaining strength would hardly make a company. The battle might only have been well begun, but at least, thanks to them and to those scattered heaps lying among the grass, spread in clumps and circles about the yawning shell-holes, buried beneath the broken parapets and in the smashed trenches--to them, and those, and these others passing out with haggard, pain-lined faces, shattered limbs, and torn bodies on the red, wet stretchers to the dressing stations, at least, the battle was well begun. The sappers were hard at work in the darkness consolidating the captured positions, and these would surely now be held firm. Whatever was to follow, these first regiments had done their share. Two lines of trenches were taken; the line was advanced--advanced, it is true, a bare one or two hundred yards, but with lives poured out like water over each foot of the advance, with every inch of the ground gained marking a well-spring and fountain-head of a river of pain, of a suffering beyond all words, of a glory above and beyond all suffering. A CONVERT TO CONSCRIPTION '_. . . have maintained and consolidated our position in the captured trench._'--EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH. Number nine-two-ought-three-six, Sapper Duffy, J., 'A' Section, Southland Company, Royal Engineers, had been before the War plain Jem Duffy, labourer, and as such had been an ardent anti-militarist, anti-conscriptionist, and anti-everything else his labour leaders and agitators told him. His anti-militarist beliefs were sunk soon after the beginning of the War, and there is almost a complete story itself in the tale of their sinking, weighted first by a girl, who looked ahead no further than the pleasure of walking out with a khaki uniform, and finally plunged into the deeps of the Army by the gibe of a stauncher anti-militarist during a heated argument that, 'if he believed now in fighting, why didn't he go'n fight himself?' But even after his enlistment he remained true to his beliefs in voluntary service, and the account of his conversion to the principles of Conscription--no half-and-half measures of 'military training' or rifle clubs or hybrid arrangements of that sort, but out-and-out Conscription--may be more interesting, as it certainly is more typical, of the conversion of more thousands of members of the Serving Forces than will ever be known--until those same thousands return to their civilian lives and the holding of their civilian votes. * * * * *