I saw the Royal Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusiliers come back from this exploit, exhausted, caked from head to foot in wet clay. Their steel helmets were covered with sand-bagging, their trench-waders, their rifles, and smoke helmets were all plastered by wet, white earth, and they looked a ragged regiment of scarecrows gathered from the fields of France. Some of them had shawls tied about their helmets, and some of them wore the shiny black helmets of the Jaeger Regiment and the gray coats of German soldiers. They had had luck. They had not left many comrades behind, and they had come out with life to the good world. Tired as they were, they came along as though to carnival. They had proved their courage through an ugly job. They had done “damn well,” as one of them remarked; and they were out of the shell-fire which ravaged the ground they had taken, where other men lay. XVI At the beginning of March there was a little affair--costing a lot of lives--in the neighborhood of St.-Eloi, up in the Ypres salient. It was a struggle for a dirty hillock called the Bluff, which had been held for a long time by the 3d Division under General Haldane, whose men were at last relieved, after weary months in the salient, by the 17th Division commanded by General Pilcher. The Germans took advantage of the change in defense by a sudden attack after the explosion of a mine, and the men of the 17th Division, new to this ground, abandoned a position of some local importance. General Haldane was annoyed. It was ground of which he knew every inch. It was ground which men of his had died to hold. It was very annoying--using a feeble word--to battalion officers and men of the 3d Division--Suffolks and King's Own Liverpools, Gordons and Royal Scots--who had first come out of the salient, out of its mud and snow and slush and shell-fire, to a pretty village far behind the lines, on the road to Calais, where they were getting back to a sense of normal life again. Sleeping in snug billets, warming their feet at wood fires, listening with enchantment to the silence about them, free from the noise of artillery. They were hugging themselves with the thought of a month of this... Then because they had been in the salient so long and had held this line so stubbornly, they were ordered back again to recapture the position lost by new men.