"We got a message from headquarters," he writes in _Blackwood's Magazine_, "saying that we must hold out at all costs, as reinforcements were coming up as quickly as possible to our support. A corporal in charge of prisoners said that the Wiltshire Regiment had suffered terribly, as also the Scots Fusiliers, both having been badly peppered with 'Jack Johnsons,' which had buried many of them alive in their trenches. "At 7 a.m. next morning (the 24th) Captain Drysdale came up to me and asked me to hurry up two battalions which were expected every minute from the First Army Corps. The position was most critical, _as we had not one man left to support the firing line_, which was being very hardly pressed, and might give way at any moment. At last, then, the long-expected supports were arriving. Our men had behaved like heroes all. This was the seventh day since we engaged the Germans, one division extending over an unheard-of front of eight miles, and holding up what I understood from one of our prisoners yesterday to be a force of three army corps--that is, 15,000 to 20,000 British against 150,000 Germans! The ordeal of the last three days had been terrible. These brave fellows actually had no sleep for seven days, and had never left the trenches, fighting night and day, sticking to them until they were literally blown out of them or buried alive. They were now becoming pieces of wood, sleeping standing up, and firing almost mechanically, with the slightest support from our guns, which were now outclassed.... "Having got on to the road, I found the Northumberland Hussars,[67] who had evidently been brought up with the idea of their taking possession of the trenches if the supports were not up in time. In ten minutes I sighted the head of a battalion swinging up the road, and ran down as directed to hurry them up. Found them to be the Highland Light Infantry and King's Own Scottish Borderers. I told the commanding officer the position, and he doubled them round the wood to the trenches which our fellows were holding with their last gasp." On this day, 24th October, the point of the salient gave way. The gallant Wiltshires were driven in, and the Germans pushed into a wood west of Becelaere, where there was much desperate fighting for days to come. The Warwicks were ordered to make a counter-attack, in the course of which they lost 105 officers and men, including their colonel. He had been wounded in the foot three days before, but he nevertheless led his men in the charge with fiery courage. His horse was shot under him, but he found another, which was also shot, and this time Colonel Loring rose no more. In those dread days of struggle no regiment played a more heroic part than the Warwicks; they emerged from the ordeal a mere ghost of their former strength.