It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under the shell-fire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we flung over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held the lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of our little hells. “Things happened,” said one of them, “which in other times would have been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death.” For days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2's flinging up volumes of sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then trench-mortars and bombs. “It seemed like years!” said one of the Irish crowd. “None of us expected to come out alive.” Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black coffee. Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge--you remember Hooge?--the 14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred casualties in one battalion The German gun-fire lengthened, and men were killed on their way out to “rest”--camps to the left of the road between Poperinghe and Vlamertinghe. * * * On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northumberland Fusiliers--the old Fighting Fifth--captured six hundred yards of German trenches near St.-Eloi and asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them who followed them. Their attack was against a German stronghold built of earth and sand-bags nine feet high, above a nest of trenches in the fork of two roads from St.-Eloi to Messines. They mined beneath this place and it blew up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil in a black mass. Then the Fusiliers dashed forward, flinging bombs through barbed wire and over sand-bags which had escaped the radius of the mine-burst--in one jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get on, to kill, and to come back. One German machine-gun got to work on them. It was knocked out by a bomb flung by an officer who saved his company. The machine--gunners were bayoneted. Elsewhere there was chaos out of which living men came, shaking and moaning.