"As I was watching the woods on our left front towards the Gheluvelt-Menin road, I saw the Yorks retiring and the Gordons advancing. I pointed this out to the general, who immediately sent to find out by whose orders they were retiring. Presently, to our consternation, the Gordons came back farther down the road towards Gheluvelt; before we could do anything, the Yorks came streaming over the open ploughed land. The general galloped down the road to stop the Gordons, and I tried to stop the Yorks, who persisted that the order had been given to them to retire. We concluded that the order must have been given by a German officer, and formed them up along the road under a terrible shrapnel fire. They were being bowled over like ninepins, as the Germans must have seen them crossing the open. We tumbled them into the ditch alongside the road, and it was a pitiable sight to see the poor fellows who were still in the open and badly hit trying to crawl along towards our headquarters to take shelter from the hail of shrapnel bullets.... They were by now all lying out under the wall of the farm, and the place looked like a shambles. It was a splendid sight to see Lieutenant Jardine of the R.A.M.C. running out under a hail of bullets and bringing in one wounded man after another on his back.... Presently the shell fire died down a bit, and the men in the ditches alongside the road, having had time to recover, advanced once more to regain the ground which they had lost.... One poor chap of the Warwicks whom I spoke to, and had been very badly mauled, said, 'Well, sir, England can't say we did not stick it to the last.'" In the counter-attack to which the Gordons were now advancing nearly the whole of the First Corps was engaged. Some very gallant charges were made, in one of which Lieutenant J.A.O. Brooke of the 2nd Gordons won the Victoria Cross and lost his life as you will read later on. About 2 p.m. the enemy began to give way, and by dark most of the line north of the Menin road had been recovered. The same day the Third Corps was heavily assailed at Le Gheir, in what our soldiers call "Plugstreet" Woods,[68] and there was desperate fighting beneath its ragged larches. Here, again, trenches were lost and won. The Middlesex were driven out; but the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders nobly came to the rescue, and against great odds recaptured the trenches and slew almost every German in them.