Old Ireland has done great things." The boys, as he called them, though some are old soldiers who fought at Suvla Bay, and the youngest of them are old in war and remember as far back in history as the days when they stormed through Guillemont and Ginchy, were sitting with German caps on their heads, and examining German machine-guns, and sorting all their souvenirs of battle. I talked with many of them, and they told their adventures of yesterday with a touch of Irish humour and a sparkle in their eyes. It was the little things of battle which they remembered most; the rations and soda-water they found in German dug-outs; the way they groped around for souvenirs as soon as they gained their ground. But stupendous still in their imagination was the drum-fire of our guns and the explosion of the mines. [Illustration: THE MESSINES RIDGE AND PASSCHENDAELE London: W^m. Heinemann _Stanford's Geog^l. Estab^t., London_] "As soon as the barrage began," said an Irish sergeant of the Munsters, "a mine only a few hundred yards away from us at Maedelstede Farm went up, and we went down. The ground rocked under us, and fire rushed up to the sky. The fumes came back on to us and made us dizzy, but we--the Royal Irish and the Munsters--went on to Petit-Bois Wood, and then to Wytschaete Wood, and other Irish lads passed through us to the attack on the village." The only trouble was in and about the wood. In the centre of it was a small body of Germans, with a machine-gun, who held out stubbornly and swept the Irish with fire. But they were destroyed, and the attack swept on. There was another post hereabout, in which a party of Germans held out with rifle-fire. An Irish officer of a famous old family led an attack on this, and fell dead with a bullet in his brain at five yards range, but a sergeant with him, whom I met to-day, helped to surround the enemy, and this hornets' nest was routed out. A German officer had climbed a tree, and in the coolest possible way signalled with his hand to his men beyond. An Irishman brought him down, and made him a prisoner. Wytschaete village was a fortress position, with machine-gun emplacements made for defence on all sides, but the Irish closed round it and captured it easily. The garrison was demoralized by prolonged shell-fire, which had made a clean sweep of the hospice ruins and the church and château, and every blade of grass above their tunnels. "I am an old soldier," said one of their officers, "and I hate to be a prisoner, but human nature cannot stand the strain of such bombardments."