The conditions of these low-lying valleys to the north, which had long been difficult, had now become really impossible, and this was the last attempt to advance in the Houlthulst Forest area. It takes personal and detailed narrative to enable the reader to realise the situation which the troops had to face. An officer of the 170th Brigade, a Lancashire unit which displayed great valour and lost half its numbers upon this date, writes: "I have never seen such a sight as that country was in the valley of the Broombeek and Watervlietbeek just south of Houthulst Forest. Nothing on earth but the wonderful courage of the Lancashire lads enabled them to get so far as they did. We went over with our rifles and Lewis guns bound up with flannel so as to keep the mud out, and with special cleaning apparatus in our pockets, but you can't clean a rifle when your own hands are covered an inch thick! We killed a great {227} number--one of the Sergeants in the 'Loyals' laid out 13 with his bayonet; altogether we actually killed over 600 with the bayonet: but, as I say, the ground was too heavy to allow us to out-manoeuvre the pill-boxes, and though we took three or four, the rest did us in. In one box we got 38 Boche, killed them all with a Lewis gun through the porthole." After that day no more advance was tried in the low-lying valleys named. The impossibility was seen. The Canadian Corps went forward with one brigade of the Fourth Division upon the right and two brigades of the Third Division upon the left. A brigade of the First Australian Division supported their left upon the Ypres-Roulers railway, and the Sixty-third Naval Division continued the attack. Each of these units gained ground under the most desperate conditions. The Australians captured Decline Wood, so securing the flank of the attack. The Canadians pushed forward on each side of the Revebeek, one of the innumerable streams which meander through this country. The Third Canadian Division advanced finely, but their right-hand brigade was held up by the machine-gun fire from Bellevue Spur, which had wrought such damage in the former attack, and was compelled to fall back upon its original line. The Canadians rallied for a second spring, and in the afternoon by a splendid effort, when all their Northern grit and energy were needed, they flooded over the obstacle and lined up with their comrades. They were now right astride of the main ridge and close up to the edge of the village. To the north, the Sixty-third Naval Division, which formed the right unit of Maxse's Corps, pushed forward to the line of the {228} Paddebeek, while the Londoners of the Fifty-eighth Division kept their place upon the left. The German artillery had greatly increased in strength, thanks to the Russian collapse, and every fresh idiocy of Petrograd was transmuted into showers of steel and iron in the plains of Flanders. Their infantry