other out of the bogs, rescuing each other free from the rain-filled shell-pits. So they lost the only protection there is from machine-guns, the screen of great belts of gun-fire, and the Germans had time to get out of the concrete houses and to get up from the shell-holes and fire at our advancing groups of muddy men. Many Germans were sniping from these holes, and others were up broken trees with machine-guns on small wooden platforms. I met one man to-day who had eleven comrades struck down in his own group by one of the snipers. A party was detached to search for the German rifleman, but they could not find him. They got ahead through Peter Pan House and then they had to face another blast of machine-gun fire. The German garrison, in a place called Yetta House, gave trouble in the same way, and there was a nest of machine-guns ahead at Bellevue. Some Yorkshire lads of the 49th Division went up there to rout them out, but what happened is not yet known. All through the day and last night the Lancashire men were under the streaming bullets of a machine-gun barrage, which whipped the ground about them as fast as falling hailstones, so that no man could put his head above a shell-hole without getting a bullet through his steel hat. I have seen many of those steel hats punctured clean through, but with the men who wore them still alive and able to smile grimly enough when they pointed to these holes. At night the lightly wounded men who tried to get back had a desperate time trying to find their way. Some of them walked away to the German lines and were up to the barbed wire before they found out their mistake. It was difficult to get any sense of direction in the darkness, but the German flares helped them. They rose with a very bright light, flooding the swamps of No Man's Land with a white glare, revealing the tragedy of the battlefield, where many bodies lay still in the bogs, for many men had been killed. Before the darkness German aeroplanes came over, as it were, in dense flocks. One Lancashire boy declared he counted thirty-seven as he lay looking up to the sky from a shell-hole, and they flew low to see where our men had made their line. Our stretcher-bearers worked through the day and night, but it was hard going even with empty stretchers, and they fell and got bogged like the fighting men, and many were hit by shell-fire and machine-gun bullets. With full stretchers they made their way back slowly, and each journey took many hours, and on the way they stuck many times in bogs and slipped many times waist-deep in shell-holes. The transport and the carriers struggled with equal courage through the slough of despond, trying to get up rations to their cold and hungry comrades and ammunition wanted by riflemen and machine-gunners. Even in water beyond their belts the men tried to clean their rifles and their belts from the mud which had fouled them, knowing that later on their lives might depend on this.