[11] Killed November, 1914. GHELUVELT October 31st may be said to have witnessed the supreme effort of the enemy to break through to Ypres. The attack on this day was pressed simultaneously along the whole of our front from Messines to the Menin road, and lasted not only throughout the day but during the greater part of the night. This tremendous battle, covering as it did a frontage of twelve miles, can only be adequately described by cutting it up into three sections, the first of which deals with the fight along the Menin road, the second with the struggle at Klein Zillebeke, and the third with the attack on the cavalry corps at Wytschate and Messines. We will deal first with the fight on the Menin road. Here, it will be remembered, our troops had been forced back on the 29th from a line just west of Kruiseik cross-roads to the Gheluvelt trenches, three-quarters of a mile further back, and on the higher ridge on which that village stands. On the morning of the 31st the new position was in its turn attacked, and under conditions which in many ways recalled the fight of two days before. There was, however, this difference, that, while the attack of the 29th had been in the nature of a surprise in the fog, and had been unheralded by any previous cannonade, that of the 31st was preceded by a bombardment which, in point of violence, threw into the shade everything which the campaign had yet witnessed. The expenditure of ammunition must have been colossal. This terrific discharge of missiles commenced at daybreak, and gradually increased in volume up to eleven o'clock, when it ceased and the infantry attack commenced. The shell-fire had been mainly focussed on the 3rd and 22nd Brigades in the neighbourhood of Gheluvelt. By the association of these two Brigades, the 1st and 2nd battalions of the Queen's (R. West Surrey Regiment) for the first time in history found themselves fighting side by side. The occasion was an historic one, but not without a strong note of tragedy, both battalions being in the direct track of the bombardment, and suffering very severely. Each battalion, too, lost its C.O. during the morning, Col. Pell of the 1st Battalion being killed and Col. Coles of the 2nd Battalion wounded. The tactics of the enemy in these Menin road attacks almost always took the same form. All the batteries within the area would concentrate on the road and on the trenches immediately to right and left of the road, making these positions absolutely untenable. Then, when the troops in the track of the shell-fire had fallen back dazed into semi-unconsciousness by the inferno, they would drive a dense mass of infantry into the gap, and so enfilade--and very often surround--the trenches which were still occupied to right and left of the gap. By this method, companies, and sometimes whole battalions, which had stuck out the shell-fire, were overwhelmed and annihilated.