Do you remember a description I gave you some months back of seeing Huns brought up from a captured dug-out? That’s long enough ago now for me to be able to give you a few details. A fortnight before the show commenced it was planned that an officer from each battery with a party of volunteers should follow up the infantry attack and build a road through the Hun Front line over which our artillery should advance. The initial work was carried on at night, and the road was built right up to our own front-line. On the morning of the attack I took my volunteers forward and hid with the rest of the party in one of our support trenches. We judged that we should escape the Hun barrage there, and should have advanced before his retaliation on our back country commenced. Soon after midnight, on a cold morning when the sleet was falling, we set out. The sky was faintly tinged with a grey dawn when our offensive opened. Suddenly the intense and almost spiritual quiet was changed into frantic chaos. The sky was vividly lit with every kind of ingeniously contrived destruction. In addition to his other shells, the Hun flung back gas and liquid fire. It looked as though no infantry could live in it. Within an hour of the offensive starting, each officer crept out of his trench and went forward to reconnoitre the ground, taking with him one N.C.O. and a runner. My runner carried with him a lot of stakes with white rags attached for marking out our route. We wound our way carefully through the shells until we reached our own Front line. Here the Hun barrage was falling briskly, and gas-shells were coming over to beat the band. The bursting of explosives was for all the world like corn popping in a pan. We ran across what had been No Man’s Land and entered the Hun wire. My job was to build from here to his support-trenches. His frontline trench was piled high with dead. The whole spectacle was unreal as something that had been staged; the corpses looked like wax-works. One didn’t have time to observe much, for flames seemed to be going off beneath one’s feet almost every second, and it seemed marvellous that we contrived to live where there was so much death. As we went farther back we began to find our own khaki-clad dead. I don’t think the Huns had got them; it was our own barrage, which they had followed too quickly in the eagerness of the attack. Then we came to where the liquid fire had descended, for the poor fellows had thrown themselves into the pools in the shell-holes and only the faces and arms were sticking out. Then I recognised the support-trench, which was the end of my journey, and planted my Union Jack as a signal for the other officers who were to build ahead of me. With my runner and N.C.O. I started to reconnoitre my road back, planting my stakes to mark the route. When I was again at what had been our Front line, I sent my runner back to guide in my volunteers. What a day it was! For a good part of the time