Just one mile east of Zillebeke is Sanctuary Wood, full of poplars, elms, and maples, and below it to the south is another wood which our soldiers call Armagh Wood. All this is just within the Salient. It is all low-lying ground, save here and there a ridge or mound--for the enemy has all the high ground to the east--that low ridge of hills lying some 150 feet above the level of Ypres, which is only fifty feet above sea-level. The boundaries of the Salient are not imaginary; they are real boundaries, for all that they lie hidden. A deep and narrow trench encompasses the territory, which juts out half a mile east, but south of Hooge, and three-quarters of a mile due west of the Chateau of Herenthage, the scene in happier days of garden fêtes and rustic merry-making. Yesterday, pushing along past Zillebeke lake, the supporting battalions came through the deadly barrage to relieve the weary troops who had spent the whole of Tuesday in constant fighting. "It was a magnificent thing," one of their colonels told me, "to watch those fellows moving on past three barrages, many of them hit and stopping a while to bind up their wounds, and then up and at it again, like dare-devils that nothing could stop. I have never--never seen anything finer." [Illustration: (Photograph--street in Ypres)] Once the relieving force was well within the recovered British trenches, the bombardment of the latter grew fierce, and in those sections of the line where our old outposts had not been reached, much desperate fighting took place in the ensuing forty-eight hours. The tide of battle flowed this way or that, as hill or trench was taken by us or retaken by the enemy. One officer had advanced his machine-gun in a favourable position to prevent enfilading, in case the Germans should return to this particular trench. The Germans did return. A shell lifted the gun clean out over the officer’s head, and he lay stunned for a while on the ground. When he recovered consciousness, the Germans were behind him. In a moment, with a little assistance, he had it working briskly in the opposite direction, and was hard at it, when a shell gave him a mortal wound. I was told to-day of one gunner who, thoroughly exhausted, went to sleep by his gun, and was actually not awakened by Wednesday’s terrific Boche artillery onslaught. When the enemy pushed through, he still slept. Two of them, thinking him dead, laid hands on his gun and proceeded to work it, when he awoke at last and realised the situation. He sprang upon them in fury, and was in close conflict with them when some of our men came up, giving chase to a platoon of flying Huns. The subsequent effectiveness of his weapon our gunner put down to his having got forty winks of slumber at a time when the enemy was having everything his own way!