At the outset of the attack the enemy showed himself ready to meet it with a fierce resistance. Last night was terribly cold, and our troops lying out in shell-holes or in shallow trenches dug a day or two ago, suffered from this exposure. The Scottish troops of the 15th Division on the south of the Scarpe had fought in the first days' battles of Arras, and, with English troops of the 37th, had gone forward to Monchy and into the storm-centre of the German fire. Some of the men I met to-day had been buried by German crumps, and had been dug out again, and as they lay waiting for the hour of attack shells fell about them and the sky was aflame with flashes of our bombs. The men craved for something hot to drink. "I would have given all the money I have for a cup of tea," said one of them. But they nibbled dry biscuits and waited for the dawn, and hoped they would not be too numb when the light came to get up and walk. The light came very pale over the earth, and with it the signal to attack. Our bombardment had been steady all through the night, and then broke into hurricane fire. As soon as our men left the trenches our gunners laid down a barrage in front of them, and made a moving wall of shells ahead of them--a frightful thing to follow, but the safest if the men did not go too quick or fail to distinguish between the line of German shells and our own. It was not easy to distinguish, for our men had hardly risen from the shell-holes and ditches before the enemy's barrage started, and all the ground about them was vomiting up fountains of mud and shell-splinters. At the same time there came above all the noise of shell-fire a furnace-blast of machine-guns. Machine-gunners in Roeux and Pelves, in the two small woods in front of Monchy, and in the ground about Guémappe were slashing all the slopes and roads below Monchy-on-the-Hill. "It was the most awful machine-gun fire I have heard," said a young Gordon this morning, as he came back with a bullet in his hip. "The beggars were ready for us, and made it very hot. But we folk went on, those of us who weren't hit quickly, and made an attack on the village of Guémappe." "The enemy dropped his barrage on to us mighty quick," said a Worcestershire lad, "but we managed, most of us, to get past his crumps. It took a lot of dodging in shell-holes, and the worst was his machine-gun fire, which was terrific." Below Monchy the enemy was in trenches defended by enfilade fire from redoubts along the Cambrai road, and when our English troops swept down on them the Germans ran at once up their own slope to the cover of a wood called Bois du Sart. Only one officer and two men remained, and they were taken prisoner, and I saw them being marched back under escort. The officer was a young Bavarian without a hat; he bore himself very jauntily, though his face was white and he was covered with dirt.