The going had been pretty bad before then, as I was told to-day by some of the men whom I met slightly wounded along the Menin road. The enemy seemed to smell danger in the night and put over a heavy barrage just before the attack started. It was on the tail of the Australians, and might have demoralized them if they had not been so high in heart. They got away in good order, and kept going to keep pace with the travelling storm of shells which broke before them. One queer thing happened near Clapham Junction. The enemy had apparently planned a raid with "flammenwerfer," or flame-jets as we call these devilish engines, at the very time of the attack and they were met by the Australian shock of assault, and fell before it. While some of the Australians worked round Glencorse Copse and Nonne Boschen or Nuns' Wood, others fought up by Westhoek across the Hanebeek towards the post called by a curious coincidence Anzac Corner. After heavy fighting for a little while at one of the blockhouses the Australian flag was planted at Anzac Corner and waves there still. In Nonne Boschen the ground was marshy and encumbered with fallen trees, but the boys struggled through somehow, and then started for the Polygon Wood, where there is no wood, as there seldom is in these places when our artillery has done its work, but only some blasted trunks and stakes. In Glencorse Wood and round about it there were a good many Germans, and they fought hard. Fifty of them were killed in hand-to-hand fighting, or fighting at close quarters, and a blockhouse on the north-west of the wood, where the garrison would not surrender, but kept his machine-guns going, was taken by a bombing attack. So after a two hours' wait at the end of the first lap the Australians flung away their cigarettes and the assaulting waves passed on to the ridge of Polygon Wood. They could not take all the line they had been asked to take in the first attempt, and were checked on the right by machine-gun fire. So they dug in on a crescent, which had its right ear somewhere by Carlisle Farm to the north of Black Watch Corner, until supports came up to make good their losses on the way, and they were able to go forward and straighten out. After that the counter-attacks began. All of them were broken up by artillery-fire, and when one of the German divisions was flung in, the only men who reached our lines were those who tried to escape from the barrage which our guns put over their assembly position. I should like to give a fuller history than I did yesterday about the taking of Inverness Copse and the bogs of the Dumbarton Lakes, and the tangled ground of Shrewsbury Forest, but I have no time, as the wires wait, except to pay a tribute to the men who fought there over most difficult country, crowded with blockhouses, and under severe fire from the enemy's guns. Men from Surrey and Kent, from the Midlands, from Wales, from the North, the battalions of the 8th and