A long column of men whom I knew had to make their way up at night to join in the attack at the dawn. I had seen them the day before, with rain slashing down on their steel hats and their shiny capes, and I thought they were as grand a set of lads as ever I have seen in France. They were men of the Lancashire battalions in the 66th Division. It was at dusk that they set out on their way up to the battle-line, and it was only a few miles they had to go. But it took them eleven hours to go that distance, and they did not get to the journey's end until half an hour before they had to attack. It was not a march. It was a long struggle against the demons of a foul night on the battlefield. The wind blew a gale against them, slapping their faces with wet canes, so that their flesh stung as at the slash of whips. It buffeted them against each other and clutched at their rifles and tried to wrench their packs off their backs. And the rain poured down upon them in fierce gusts until they were only dry where their belts crossed, and their boots were filled with water. It was pitch-dark at the beginning of the night, and afterwards there was only the light of the stars. They could not see a yard before them, but only the dark figure of the man ahead. Often that figure ahead fell suddenly with a shout. It had fallen into a deep shell-hole and disappeared. "Where are you. Bill?" shouted one man to another. "I'm bogged. For God's sake give me a hand, old lad." There was not a man who did not fall. "I fell a hundred times," said one of them. "It was nigh impossible to keep on one's feet for more than a yard or two." So that little party of men went stumbling and staggering along, trying to work across the shell-holes. "My pal Bert," said one man, "fell in deep, and then sank farther in. 'Charlie,' he cried. Two of us, and then four, tried to drag him out, but we slipped down the bank of the crater and rolled into the slime with him. I thought we should never get out. Some men were cursing and some were laughing in a wild way, and some were near crying with the cold. But somehow we got on." Somehow they got on, and that is the wonder of it. They got on to the line of the attack half an hour before the guns were to start their drum-fire, and they joined the thousands of other men who had been lying out in the shell-holes all night, and were numbed with cold and waist-high in water. Not all of them got there. The German guns had been busy most of the night, and big shells were coming over. Thirty men were killed or wounded with one shell, and others were hit and fell into the water-pools, and lay there till the stretcher-bearers--the splendid stretcher-bearers--came up to search for them. The Lancashires, who had travelled eleven hours, had had no food all that time. "I would have given my left arm for a drop of hot drink," said one of them, "I was fair perished with cold."