These were worn out, and as the days of fighting continued many of them were so dead to the world that they laid them down and slept where they dropped by battalions. When orders came, it was a matter almost of routine that each senior, handing them on, should assault his junior into some sort of comprehension. Officers dared not trust themselves even to lean against walls for fear they should slide down dead asleep; and as a private of the Line put it in confession, “I don’t know what the men would have done but for standing sentry. They got their sleep then.” There is a story of a tattered brigade, eight days, or it might have been ten, without closing an eyelid, which was flung back into the fight after assurance of relief, and, what was much worse, a few hours’ rest. They returned, like sleep-walkers, and laid them down in some shallow hen-scratchings that passed for trench-work, where without emotion they resigned themselves to being blown out or up in detail. While they watched drowsily the descent and thickening of a fresh German shell-storm, preluding fresh infantry attacks, it occurred to them vaguely that there were high and increasing noises overhead--not at all like the deep whoop of “heavies.” Then all the darkness behind the enemy lit with a low outlining ground-flare--the death-dance of innumerable .75’s. Foch had sent up very many guns behind them, almost wheel to wheel, and when the French gunners at last shut off, the packed enemy trenches that were waiting to continue their march to the Channel, as soon as their own fire should have wiped up the few British bayonets before them, lay as still as the graves that they were. Then what remained of the brigade that had seen this miracle was relieved by another brigade, and stretched itself out to sleep behind it. Experts in miseries say that, for sheer strain, the Lys overwent anything imagined in the war, and in this, many who have suffered much, are agreed. The 4th Guards Brigade, which had been in billets near Villers-Brulin, after its heavy work on the Arras side, was despatched on the 10th April to the flat country round Vierhoek, and there--as will be told--spent itself in the desperate fighting round La Couronne and Vieux-Berquin that gave time to bar the enemies’ way to Hazebrouck and--wiped out the 2nd Battalion. The 1st Battalion, sufficiently occupied with its own front near Boiry, where the support-lines were targets by day and night, and the front-posts holes in the ground that seemed to shift at every relief, were told on the 12th April that a German attack was imminent, which report was repeated at intervals throughout the day. But their patrols found nothing moving in front of them, and their regular allowance of hostile mortar-bombs was not increased. The rumours from the Lys side were far more disturbing.