Here and there stretcher bearers waited with their burdens on the roadsides. Among them were men of the Black Watch, with the red hackle in their bonnets, calm and grave like statues beside their wounded comrades lying there with white, upturned faces and never a murmur or groan. They were the heroes who yesterday, with gallant hearts, came up at a great pace when the enemy was in Wytschaete and Messines, and in a fierce counterattack drove him off the crest of the ridge and dealt him a deadly blow there on that high ground, which was won in the battle of last June, when English, Irish, and New Zealand troops stormed the ridge and captured thousands of prisoners. The enemy yesterday fell in great numbers and his dead lie thick, and though he came on wave after wave, after all his day's agony and struggle he had not gained a yard of the crest, but was beaten back. English in Death Struggle _Friday, April 12._--The enemy is playing a great game in which he is flinging all he has into the hazard of war. He has, of course, a stupendous number of men, and, while holding his lines across the Somme after his drive down from St. Quentin and playing a defensive part against the French on the British right, he has moved up to the north with secrecy and rapidity a large concentration of troops and guns for new and tremendous blows against Haig's forces. This is continuing his now determined policy to crush England before either France or America is able to draw off his divisions by counteroffensives. So now the British troops in the north are faced by enormous forces. Nearly thirty German divisions are against them from Wytschaete to La Bassée Canal, and with those troops are innumerable machine guns, trench mortars, and massed batteries of field guns, very quick to get forward in support of their infantry. This northern offensive is as menacing as that which began to the southward on March 21, and the gallant men among these little red brick villages in French Flanders and in the flat fields between Bailleul and Béthune are greatly outnumbered and can hold back the enemy only by fighting with supreme courage. Horrors Amid Beauty The scene today along the line of this hostile invasion was most tragic, because all the cruelty of war was surrounded by beauty so intense that the contrast was horrible. The sky was of Summer blue, with sunshine glittering on the red-tiled roofs of the cottages and on their whitewashed walls and little windowpanes. All the hedges were clothed with green and flaked by snow-white thorn blossoms. In a night, as it seems, all the orchards of France have flowered, and cherry and apple trees are in full splendor of bloom, fields are powdered with close-growing daisies, and the shadows of trees are long across the grass as the sun is setting. But over all this and in the midst of all this is agony and blood. On the roads are fugitives, wounded soldiers, dead horses, guns, and transports.