It is fortunate--in counting the high price of the battle--that many of our wounded are only lightly touched by shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. I saw these walking wounded coming back; tired, brave men, who bore their pain with most stoic endurance, so that there was hardly a groan to be heard among them. Now and again overhead was the shrill whine of an approaching shell, "Whistling Percy" by name, but they paid no heed after their great escape from the far greater peril. They formed up in a long queue outside the dressing-station, where doctors waited for them, and where there was a hot drink to be had. They were covered with mud, and were too weary and spent to talk. That long line of silent, wounded men will always remain in my memory. Outside in the sunlight, waiting their turn to enter the dressing-station, some of the men lay down on the bank in queer, distorted attitudes very like death, and slept there. Others came hobbling with each arm round the neck of the stretcher-bearers, or led forward blind, gropingly. It was the whimper of these blind boys and the agony on their faces which was most tragic in all this tragedy, those and the men smashed about the face and head so that only their eyes stared through white masks. Near by were German prisoners standing against the sunlit wall, pale, sick, and hungry-looking men, utterly dejected. A German aeroplane flew overhead on the way behind our lines, shot at all the way by our anti-aircraft guns, but very bold. Our kite-balloons, white as snow-clouds in the blue sky, stared over the battlefield where our men are still fighting in the midst of great shell-fire. * * * * * APRIL 25 This battle which is still in progress east of Arras is developing rather like the early days of the Somme battles, when our men fought stubbornly to gain or regain a few hundred yards of trenches in which the enemy resisted under the cover of great gun-fire, and to which he sent up strong bodies of supporting troops to drive our men out by counter-attacks. In the ground east of Monchy, between the Scarpe and the Sensée rivers, the situation is exactly like that, and, as I said yesterday, the line of battle has ebbed to and fro in an astounding way, British and German troops fighting forwards and backwards over the same ground with alternating success.