artillery or trench mortars, and so only “Tommy’s Cookers” could be used. Such were the conditions under which the Battalion held the line in the November and December of 1915. For utter misery they have only been equalled once--on the Passchendaele Ridge in December, 1917--and then for a much shorter period. A man had a ghastly prospect in front of him when his turn came to form part of a front line garrison for forty-eight hours. For all that time he would be thoroughly soaked and terribly cold; his boots would be full of water, he would stand in water and mud; physical pain, mental weariness and bodily fatigue would be his constant burden. The chances were that he would not complete his tour of duty--that before his time was up he would succumb to the enemy snipers, or be on his way to hospital, a physical wreck. One example is sufficient to show what appalling casualties were suffered during this period. About the beginning of December, an officer of the Battalion took up twenty-four other ranks for a forty-eight hour tour of duty in the front line. At the end of that time he brought out with him one signaller and three other ranks. Every other man had become a casualty. But what of the spirit of the men of the Battalion during this time? How did they bear their hardships? Many writers have paid tribute to the gallantry of British troops in battle, but few have written of the heroism of those who held the line under such conditions as the 4th Battalion did in the autumn of 1915. The soldier in battle has excitement, and a good deal of exhilaration, to help him through; but the Yorkshiremen who faced the enemy near Boesinghe in 1915 had neither of these. Theirs was heroism of a far higher order--the heroism which, with no excitement to buoy them up, can make men coolly and quietly face horror and death in their worst forms. Such men as Kipling must have been thinking of when he wrote, “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the will which says to them ‘Hold on’.” They were MEN, were those of the 4th Battalion, who held the line in 1915. Men of the quiet, tight-lipped and dogged type, who talked little, though occasional flashes of humour brighten even this ghastly picture, but simply obeyed orders without question and held on. Perhaps their feelings can best be expressed by quoting the remark of one of them, when on short leave from that hell. “Well, sir, we either have to laugh or cry, and we prefer to laugh.”