On the part of the French, the losses during the first half of July were also heavy. Of individual losses, the most serious were caused in the early morning of July 12 by a heavy shell which destroyed the 1st Division command-post, killing Major Romieux, Chief of Staff, and mortally wounding General Masnou, commanding the 1st Division. He was succeeded by General Brulard, who had seen much service in Morocco. Lieut.-Colonel Vernhol was his Chief of Staff. Some idea of the habitual life in the fighting lines during the next two or three weeks of comparative quiet may be gathered from notes which I wrote hurriedly at the time. Towards the end of July I was staying on the wreck of the _River Clyde_, daily visiting one section or other of the British lines (the French being “out of bounds,” though in later months I found all French officers and men anxious to welcome us). One day when I had been chiefly with the 42nd Division and the 38th Brigade (13th Division) temporarily attached to them for training, I made the following notes among others: [Sidenote: DESCRIPTION OF HELLES] “Starting from W Beach, you struggle through dust clouds, ‘left shoulder up,’ till you find one of the dusty white tracks by which Krithia villagers used to visit the town of Seddel Bahr. One passes through what was lately a garden of wild flowers, fields, vineyards, and scattered olive trees, but is now the desolation which people make and call war. It is a wilderness of mounds and pits and trenches, of heaped-up stores and rows of horses stabled in the open, of tarpaulin dressing-stations behind embankments, of carts and wagons continually on the move, of Indian muleteers continually striving to inculcate human reason into mules. Except for a few surviving trees, hardly a green thing remains. Over all this wilderness a cloud of dust sweeps perpetually, and on the results of war flies multiply with a prosperity unknown to them before. “Shaded by the largest remaining trees lay the headquarters of the Royal Naval Division, always near the front, always engaged, and hardly enough recognised. Being neither army nor navy, they share the common danger of nondescripts, and people at home do not forget the untrained condition in which they were rushed out to Antwerp. Now war has given them the sternest training, and here they stand, always ready to take a foremost place in the fighting line, singularly clean in dug-out and trench, singularly free from all the common ailments of a war in sun and flying dirt.