Having served this apprenticeship, and learned that the men who wore red breeks were French, and those with porter’s bonnets Belgians, they marched forward into the great battle-line in Flanders. What devastation! What ruthless savagery! Churches, hospitals, cottages, in ruins. Women and children homeless and fatherless, and cursing the barbarous Huns. And still more processions of prisoners, wounded and dying. Death on all sides, blood everywhere. Horror upon horror, allied with hardship, pain, and sorrow. Tough as this regiment was, the sights saddened and made them wise. This was war. And they were plunged into the midst of all in less than a day. It was their job to relieve a regiment of regulars, who had been fighting since Mons. This corps was stuck in trenches a hundred yards from the enemy’s lines. Snipers had thinned the officers’ ranks; repeated assaults had killed and worn out the N.C.O.’s and men. To relieve them was a problem, for the area behind their trenches was a shell-swept zone. But it had to be done. The safest time was at night, so when dusk had come they cautiously went forward. Sometimes they ran, at other points they had to creep and crawl. For a while all seemed well, but aerial scouts had told their tale. Just as the regiment reached the trenches, all were startled with the lurid flashing of great star-shells in the sky. This lit up the whole area and showed the lines of men advancing into the trenches. Crack! went a Mauser rifle. This was a signal for hundreds more. More star-shells went up, and then the Maxim guns of the enemy opened a deadly fire. "Double to the trenches!" roared a staff officer, who was the guide. In a few minutes the whole were jumping into the long water-logged fortresses. Many were left behind wounded and dying, but the danger ahead was too great to study these casualties. Volley after volley came across the narrow zone. The hits were now few, for sighting was impossible. To the crouching men, who had just been baptised, the affair was somewhat awe-inspiring. Many a man shivered, just as nearly all brave men shiver in their first fight. The moans of the wounded men who lay behind did not help matters. Worse, however, was yet to come. The Germans, somehow, feared a night attack. Determined to check this, they sallied out on a counter-assault. Across the hundred-yard zone they ran, cursed, yelled, and stumbled. It was an anxious moment, for the star-shells only lit the ground in a dim way. Colonel Corkleg, however, was equal to the hour. "Out men and at them!" he roared from a point somewhere in the darkened region. There was a loud clatter as his gallants leapt out of their trenches. A second to fix their bayonets, then passing through the little avenues in the barbed wire they quickly formed and charged.