little before dawn, and lay out with all four companies in the front line, as did the other battalions. By this time, though it would be not easy to trace their various arrivals in the confusion, the Guards Brigades had got into line between Boisleux-St. Marc and Ayette, on a front of roughly three and a half miles, while battalions of exhausted and withdrawing divisions, hard pressed by the enemy, passed through them each with its burden of bad news. It was not an inspiriting sight, nor was the actual position of the Guards Brigades one to be envied. High ground commanded them throughout, and a number of huts and half-ruined buildings gave good cover to the gathering machine-guns. The German advance on that quarter resembled, as one imaginative soul put it, an encompassment of were-wolves. They slouched forward, while men rubbed tired eyes, in twos and threes, at no point offering any definite target either for small-arm or artillery, and yet, in some wizard fashion, always thickening and spreading, while our guns from the rear raged and tore uselessly at their almost invisible lines. Incidentally, too, our own gun-fire in some sectors, and notably behind the Fourth Guards Brigade, did our men no service. But the most elaborate of preparations have an end, and must culminate in the charge home. An intense barrage on the morning of the 27th March heralded the crisis, but luckily went wide of all the Battalion except No. 2 Company on the left. The attack followed, and down the trenched line from Ayette and Boisleux-St. Marc, the Brigade answered with unbroken musketry and Lewis-guns. It was an almost satisfactory slaughter, dealt out by tired, but resolute, men with their backs to the wall. Except for occasional rushes of the enemy, cut down ere they reached the wire, there was nothing spectacular in that day’s work. The Battalion shot and kept on shooting as it had been trained to do in the instruction-camps and on the comfortable ranges that seemed now so inconceivably far away. The enemy, having direct observation over the whole of our line, shot well and close. We suffered, but they suffered more. They ranged along the front from north to south as waves range down the face of a breakwater, but found nothing to carry away or even dislodge. Night closed in with a last rush at the wire on the Battalion’s front that left a wreckage of German dead and wounded, and two machine-guns horribly hung up in the strands. Our losses in officers were 2nd Lieutenant Stokes severely wounded in the morning, and in the afternoon, Lieutenant Nash killed, and Captain Derek FitzGerald wounded and sent down. Lieut.-Colonel R. V. Pollok and Lieutenants Bence-Jones and Bagenal were also slightly wounded but remained at duty. When an officer dropped and could not get up again without help he was assumed to be unfit for work--but not before. (“Ye’ll understand, ’twas no question, those days, what ye could or could not do. Ye _did_ it.”)