In that northern part of the attack by the London battalions of the 47th and the Yorkshires and other English troops of the 23rd Division, who started near Triangle Wood, there was bad ground for assembly before the battle known as the Mud-Patch. There were no trenches there, and our lads had to lie out all night in the open without any cover from the shell-fire. It seemed that the Germans saw them, and their commanding officer was in a fever of anxiety, thinking they were discovered and would be shelled to death. But, as though expecting a raid from one point, the enemy only barraged round a group of mine-craters, from which our men had been withdrawn, because their shafts were packed with explosives ready to be touched off at dawn. In one mine-crater held by the Germans a shaft ran underneath called the Berlin Shaft--the way to Berlin, according to the Australians who dug it months ago. Above it was a half-company of Germans, and when the mine was blown at dawn not a man escaped. Beyond was the Damstrasse, where the enemy had deep trenches and strong emplacements in the hollow, so that our Generals were afraid of trouble here, but when our men came to it they found nothing but frightful ruin, obliterating all the trenches and redoubts, and the men who still lived there shouted: "Don't shoot, don't shoot, Kamerad!" The taking of Wytschaete by the Irish Nationalists, with Ulster men next to them, was one of the great episodes of the battle, vying with the exploit of the men of New Zealand in carrying Messines Ridge. I went among them to-day up there by Wytschaete Wood across our old trenches and by "the great wall of China," built a few months ago as a barrier--a wonderful place of sand-bag defences and deep dug-outs. Not much is left of Wytschaete Wood, once 800 yards square, now a pitiful wreckage of broken stumps and tattered tree-trunks. The slopes of the ridge are all barren and tortured with shell-fire like the Vimy Ridge, and across it unceasingly went flights of heavy shells, droning loudly as they passed over the crest, and with all our heavy howitzers firing with thunderous ear-stunning strokes. But the Irish soldiers paid no heed to this noise of gun-fire, for the enemy was answering back hardly at all, and the battle-line had gone forward. An Irish major was asleep under a little bit of a copse within a few yards of a 6-in. howitzer, splitting the heavens with its sharp crack of sound, and he slept in his socks as sweetly as a babe in the cradle until wakened to speak to me, which made me sorry, because he had earned his rest. But he sat up smiling, and glad to talk of his Irish boys, who had done gloriously. Away off near a sinister little wood, where many men have died in the old days, sat the brigadier of the Irish troops, the South and West Country Irish who went through Wytschaete Wood and took the village. "Go and see my boys up in their trenches," he said; "they will tell you all they have done, and it was well done.