They were shelled and rained upon throughout the whole of the night of the 2nd August, and on the evening of the 3rd, still in ceaseless rain, were relieved by the 1st Scots Guards and marched through mud, water and darkness, over broken ground “beyond description” to Elverdinghe Siding, where they were packed into trucks at five in the morning and taken to Poll Hill Camp near Bandaghem for training. Their casualties, all things reckoned, had been very light. They had gone into action on the 31st July with 26 officers and 1002 other ranks and had lost only 2 officers and 125 other ranks from all causes. The total casualties for the twelve battalions of the Guards Division in the action had been 59 officers and 1876 men in two days; and rain falling without a break for the next four days drowned out the sad fight. The enemy’s line had been pushed back from Bixschoote, through Frezenberg, Westhoek, Stirling Castle, and Shrewsbury Forest down to Hollebeke. At that stage our armies, as had happened so often on the Somme, were immobilised. The clay ground was cullendered and punched by the shells into chains of pools and ponds. All valleys and hollows turned into bogs where, if men wandered from the regular tracks across them, they drowned or were mired to death. If they stayed on the plankings the enemy’s guns swept them away. When all had been done that man could do, the first phase of the Third Battle of Ypres closed in a strengthened conviction that all the powers of evil were in strict alliance with Germany. Our armies held off seven counter-attacks along the line, settled themselves in it and then, perforce, waited for the weather to clear.