The Division, now part of the 5th Corps of the Fifth Army, had a strength of 703 officers and 16,972 men on September 1. The sector taken over from the 15th Division was about 1500 yards in width, from a point south-east of the Ypres—Menin railway on the right to a point 500 yards north-east of Frezenberg on the left. The roads were soon left, and the units proceeded to their positions by the duckboard paths which were the arteries from the bases to the front line, and along which generals and privates, stretcher-bearers and casualties, rations and ammunition, passed. It was more easy to lose one’s way than to keep to the track, and soldiers of both armies strayed into their opponents’ lines. A German officer, returning from leave, walked into the territory of the Division one night, and at breakfast time he was being interrogated at D.H.Q. Along the whole dreary length of duckboards the probability of slipping into one of the countless shell-holes filled with water and deep slime, was an ever-present menace which might prove fatal. At intervals small signboards were erected with the distinctive number or letter of the path in luminous paint. The front line was merely a series of linked-up shell-holes, with Battalion and Company Headquarters in pill-boxes captured from the enemy in the recent offensive. Despite such discouraging conditions a covey of partridges would often be put up at dawn by men returning along “J” trench, between Cambridge Road and the Menin Road. One shrinks from the attempt to describe the conditions that prevailed in the Ypres salient. No part of it was ever at rest. By day, aircraft sought to spot every movement that was attempted on either side, and day and night the guns sprayed the trenches, the roads, the duckboard paths, with shrapnel and H.E., the grim resolve to kill dominating every other thought or desire. The ghastly evidences of the fighting in three great battles and nearly three years of warfare were brought to light by the bombardments that tore and flung up the earth. The flares at night showed up in silhouette the figures of ration and ammunition carriers and of transport men, and brought swift destruction upon them. The runners who bore messages from one headquarters to another took their lives in their hands every time. Even for those few who were endowed by nature with the sixth sense of locality the odds were against their safe arrival and return. But the average town-bred lad has little sense of locality, so the carrying of a message meant wandering in a maze in which lurked enemies real and imaginary, varied by tumbles into shell-holes. Yet the runners generally got their messages through, and when one failed it was because another casualty had been added to the list. But if the Ypres Salient was detested by the British soldier, the enemy, although not penned within the narrow salient, regarded this sector with even greater abhorrence, and German prisoners declared that their troops, on being