"Hour after hour, day and night, with increasing intensity as the time went on, the enemy rained heavy shell into the area. Now he would send them crashing in on a line south of the road--eight heavy shells at a time, minute after minute, followed by a burst of shrapnel. Now he would place a curtain straight across this valley or that till the sky and landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through a lift of fog.... Day and night the men worked through it, fighting the horrid machinery far over the horizon as if they were fighting Germans hand to hand; building up whatever it battered down; buried some of them, not once, but again and again and again. What is a barrage against such troops? They went through it as you would go through a summer shower, too proud to bend their heads, many of them, because their mates were looking. I am telling you of things I have seen. As one of the best of their officers said to me: 'I have to walk about as if I liked it; what else can you do when your own men teach you to?'" VIII GENERAL THE HON. SIR JULIAN HEDWORTH GEORGE BYNG, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., M.V.O. SIR JULIAN BYNG was born on September 11th, 1862, the seventh son of the second Earl of Strafford. He joined the 10th Hussars in 1883, and served in the Soudan Expedition of 1884, being present at the actions of El Teb and Tamai. In South Africa he commanded a column with great distinction in the pursuit of De Wet, and finished the campaign with the rank of Colonel. One of his most successful actions was on the Vlei River, west of Reitz, where he surprised a Boer Commando and took a 15-pounder, two pom-poms, and many prisoners. He landed in Belgium in October, 1914, in command of the 3rd Cavalry Division. He accompanied Rawlinson's 7th Division in its retreat from Antwerp to Ypres. The doings of the famous 3rd Cavalry Division are writ large in history, and in all the great drama of Ypres there was no finer incident than the charge of the Household Brigade at Klein Zillebeke on November 6th, 1914. In May, 1915, General Byng succeeded General Allenby in command of the Cavalry Corps, and was responsible for the cavalry fighting in the later part of the Second Battle of Ypres. In August of that year he went to the Dardanelles to take over the command of the IX Corps, and was present during the later stages of that campaign and the famous withdrawal from the peninsula. In February, 1916, he returned to France to command the XVII Corps, and was transferred to the Canadian Corps on May 24th. [Illustration: LIEUT.-GEN. THE HON. SIR JULIAN BYNG]