The colonel of the Leinsters told another queer tale of an Irishman in the outskirts of Lens. The colonel saw him after the battle of Bois-en-Hache, which was a terrible affair and a fine feat of arms in the mud and snow, bringing back a German horse under machine-gun fire and shrapnel. He was guiding this poor lean beast over frightful ground, round the edge of monstrous shell-craters, through broken strands of barbed wire, and across trenches and parapets. "What are you doing with that poor brute?" asked the commanding officer. "Sure, sir," said the Irishman, "I'm bringing the horse back for Father Malone to ride." The horse was in the last stages of starvation, and the padre weighs nineteen stone, according to the popular estimate of the men, who adore him, and that is part of the story's humour, though the Irish soldier was very serious. It is a tribute, anyhow, to the affection of the men for this Irish padre-a laughing giant of a man--who is always out in No Man's Land when there are any of his lads out there, going as far as the German barbed wire to give the last rites to dying men. To-day, when I called on the Leinster battalion, he was away burying the poor boys who lie in the mud of the battlefield. There is no humour in that side of war, though Irish soldiers, and English soldiers too, refuse to be beaten by the foulest conditions until the last strength is out of them. In addition to the ordeal of battle they are enduring now a weather so abominable, when it is in the fields of battle, that men fight for days wet to the skin, lie out at night frozen stiff, and struggle after the enemy up to the knees in mud. So it was in this little battle of Bois-en-Hache, an historic episode in the battle of Arras, because it broke the enemy's last hope of a counter-attack against Vimy Ridge. Through the blinding blizzard of snow, the English and Irish troops attacked this hill above the River Souchez, and had to cross through a quagmire, so that numbers of them stuck up to the waist and could go neither forward nor backward, while they were swept by machine-gun and rifle fire. From that other hill, called the Pimple, to their right, which was not yet taken by the Canadians, one man came back wounded over that abominable ground under rifle-fire which spat bullets about him. He stumbled into shell-holes and crawled out again, and just as he reached the trench, fell dead across the parapet. Nearly all our men were hit in the head and body, none in the legs. That was because they were knee-deep in mud. Our men came back from this fighting like figures of clay, and so stiff at the joints that they can hardly walk, and with voices gone so that they speak in whispers.