At the end of August the Territorials from East Lancashire marched from Poperinghe into the Flemish city which had become a tragic household word throughout the British Isles. The name of Ypres had a deeper, fuller significance for the men and women at home than that of any other foreign town, and however queerly it might be pronounced the word was rarely uttered without stirring emotions of pride, admiration, horror and pity. In the streets and country lanes of the homeland were vast numbers of men, clad in garments of bright blue or grey, who had been maimed and battered in defence of the ruins of an ancient city of which they had never even heard before the autumn of 1914; the wards of hundreds of hospitals were filled with the wounded and gassed, who spoke unwillingly of the horrors of Ypres; and thousands of British homes mourned the loss of one or more who had fallen there. Ypres stood for death and mutilation and agony, and all that was most cruel and horrible in war. To wives and parents it was the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where their husbands and sons fought a never-ending fight with the Powers of Darkness, and never gave ground, yet never gained the victory. On July 31, 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres had opened with a terrific bombardment of the Hun positions, which had lasted ten days and had obliterated every sign of life and every green thing that grew. But the ill-luck that dogged the British arms had been consistent; the fine weather on which the complete success of the long-prepared offensive largely depended, came to a sudden end, and when the troops made the attack an unusually heavy rainstorm had turned the scarred, shell-pitted ground into a vast quagmire, and the thousands of shell-holes into ponds. The tanks, from which so much had been anticipated, struggled gallantly against the adverse conditions, but many of them were “bellied” at an early stage, and some of those which went furthest into the Boche lines suffered the ignominious fate of conversion into German pill-boxes and sniper-posts. A little ground had been gained, a great deal of unavailing heroism had been shown, there had been much slaughter of British and Germans, and that was all.