Here is an extract from a memorandum sent by a German machine-gunner: "The relief of this detachment is earnestly requested. We have already spent seven days in the greatest tumult. One section of trench after another gets blown in. The detachment, which now consists of three men, has eaten nothing since yesterday morning. To-morrow what remains of the front trenches will probably be shattered. If the position were not so frightfully serious, I would not have written this report." Yesterday I spent half an hour with one of our own batteries of 60-pounders, those long-nosed beasts which have a range of five miles and have helped in this great slaughter of the enemy. The commanding officer, once a judge-advocate of Johannesburg, was a man whose joviality covered a grim, resolute spirit. "My beauties," he said, "fired 1000 high-velocity shells at Old Fritz before breakfast on Monday morning. We did some very pretty work on the German lines." I saw his store of shells--monstrous brutes--in spite of all this expenditure; and listened to details of destruction in a wooden hut, provided with a piano--made by a Paris firm and captured recently in a German dug-out. "Don't your gunners get worn out?" I asked. He laughed and said, "They stick it till all's blue, night and day. What they hate are fatigues and carrying up the shells for other batteries. They'll work till they drop, serving their own guns." He looked over to Lens and said, "We'll soon have old Fritz out of that." I think they were some of his shells that I saw bursting behind the Bois de Riaumont. All through this battle our airmen have been untiring, too. Two of our men, a pilot and an observer, were attacked by a squadron of twenty-eight hostile machines, and the pilot was grievously wounded. He was badly hit in the leg, and one of his eyes hung only by a thread. But, with a supreme act of courage, he kept control of his machine and landed safely. He was dying when he was helped on to a stretcher and brought home to camp; but he made his report very clearly and calmly until he was overcome by the last faintness of death. Our men have still most bloody fighting before them. The enemy is still in great strength. We shall have to mourn most tragic and fearful losses. But the tide of battle seems to be setting in our favour, and beating back against the walls of the German armies, who must hear the approach of it with forebodings, because the barriers they built have broken and there are no impregnable ramparts behind. VI THE SLAUGHTER AT LAGNICOURT APRIL 16