It does not end when the SOS signals have been answered by hours of bombardment, but goes on again to keep German roads under fire, to smother their back areas, to batter their gun positions. So yesterday, when the German guns were getting back behind the Passchendaele, hauled back out of the mud to take up new emplacements from which they can pour explosives on the ground we have captured, our gunners could not rest, but made this work hideous for the enemy and followed his guns along their tracks. The British gunners in these frightful battles have worked with a courage and endurance to the limit of human nature, and the infantry are the first to praise them and to marvel at them. The infantry go marching in the rain and trudging in the mud, and stumbling over the water-logged craters, and out on the battlefield standing knee-deep in pools and bogs that have been made by shell-fire, cutting up the beds of the Flemish brooks, like the Hanebeek and the Stroombeek and the Reutelbeek, and by the heavy downpour on the upheaved earth. Winter conditions have come upon us, too. They were the old winter pictures of war that I saw yesterday round about the old Ypres salient, when wet men gathered under the lee side of old dug-outs with cold rain sweeping upon them, so that their waterproof capes stream with water, and pattering upon their steel hats with a sharp metallic tinkling sound. Along the roads Australian and New Zealand horsemen go riding hard, with their horses' flanks splashed with heavy gobs of mud. Gun-wagons and transports pass, flinging mud from their wheels. Ambulances, with their red crosses spattered with slime, go threading their way to the clearing-stations, with four pairs of muddy boots upturned beneath the blankets which show through the flap behind, and a dozen "sitting cases" huddled together, with their steel hats clashing and their tired eyes looking out on the traffic of war which they are leaving for a time. They come down cold and wet from the line, but in an hour or two they are warm, inside the dressing-stations, between sand-bagged walls built up inside ruined houses, still within range of shell-fire, but safer than the fields from which these men have come. "If any man feels cold," said a medical officer yesterday, "give him a hot-water bottle." To a man who had been lying in cold mud until an hour or two before it was like offering him a place by the fireside at home.