For two and a half years the Messines Ridge had been a curse to all our men who have held the Ypres salient--a high barrier against them, behind which the enemy stacked his guns, shooting at them every kind of explosive, directed upon these troops of ours in the swamps of the Douve, in the broken woods of Ploegsteert, in all the flat ground north and west of Kemmel, by German observing officers very watchful behind their telescopes on that high ground which rises up from Wytschaete to Messines. In the early days of the war, before the enemy's grey legions had swept down through Belgium in a great devastating tide, some of our artillery and our cavalry rode along the hog's back of the ridge and held it for a time against the enemy's advanced patrols. On November 1, 1914, some of our guns were parked in the market square of Warneton beyond the ridge, and on the next day found a good target in German cavalry attacking from the woods, and held their fire until these mounted men were within a thousand yards of them, when riders and horses fell under a merciless storm of shrapnel. Many Germans died that day, but behind them was the vast army which came on like a rolling sea, beating back our ten divisions--those first ten wonderful divisions who fought against overwhelming odds and massed artillery which gave them no kind of chance. So we lost Wytschaete--Whitesheet, as our men have always called it--and the Messines Ridge, and not all our efforts could get it back again. It is more than two years ago now--it was in March of 1915--that I saw an attack on Wytschaete, the first of our British bombardments which I watched after adventures in Belgium and France. Standing upon the same ground to-day, looking across the same stretch of battlefield, watching another attack up those frightful slopes, I thought back to that other day, upon that early demonstration of our artillery covering an infantry advance, and the remembrance was amazing in its contrast to this new battle in the dawn. Then our shrapnel barrage was a pretty ineffective thing--terrible as it seemed to me at the time. In those two years our gun-power has been multiplied enormously--by vast numbers of heavy guns and monstrous howitzers, and great quantities of field-guns--so that at daybreak this morning, before our men rose from their trenches to go forward in assault, the enemy's country up there was upheaved by a wild tornado of shell-fire, and the contours of the land were changed, and the sky opened and poured down shrieking steel, and the earth was torn and let forth flame.