The brunt of the fighting fell yesterday in the centre upon the troops of North-country England, the hard, tough men of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and it was Lancashire's day especially, because of those third-line Territorial battalions of Manchesters and East Lancashires and Lancashire Fusiliers, with other comrades of the 66th Division. There were some amongst them who went "over the bags," as they call it, for the first time, and who fought in one of the hardest battles that has ever been faced by British troops, with most stubborn and gallant hearts. I know by hearing from their own lips, to-day and yesterday, the narrative of the sufferings they endured, of the fight they made, and of the wounds they bear without a moan. The night march of some of these men who went up to attack at dawn seems to me, who have written many records of brave acts during three years of war, one of the most heroic episodes in all this time. It was a march which in dry, fine weather would have been done easily enough in less than three hours by men so good as these. But it took eleven hours for these Lancashire men to get up to their support line, and then, worn out by fatigue that was a physical pain, wet to the skin, cold as death, hungry, and all clotted about with mud, they lay in the water of shell-holes for a little while until their officers said, "Our turn, boys," and they went forward through heavy fire and over the same kind of ground, and fought the enemy with his machine-guns and beat him--until they lay outside their last objective and kept off counter-attacks by a few machine-guns that still remained unclogged, and rifles that somehow they had kept dry. Nothing better than that has been done, and Lancashire should thrill to the tale of it, because their sons were its heroes. Dirty, blood-stained, scarecrow heroes, as I met some of them to-day, lightly wounded, but hardly able to walk after the long trail back from the line. It was eleven hours' walking on the way up, and then, after the wild day and half a night under shell-fire and machine-gun fire, eleven hours down again, in shell-holes and out of them, falling every few yards, crawling on hands and knees through slimy trenches, staggering up by the help of a comrade's arm and going on again with set jaws, and the cry of "No surrender!" in their soul.... Gallant men. They had no complaint against the fate that had thrust them into this morass, nor any whimper against their hard luck. They told of the hard time they had had simply and gravely, without exaggeration and without self-pity, but as men who had been through a frightful ordeal with many thousands of others whose luck was no better than theirs and whose duty was the same. They came under severe machine-gun fire from some of the German blockhouses, especially on their flanks. Our barrage-fire had gone travelling beyond them, and because of the swamps and pools it was impossible to keep pace with it. Men were lugging each