Gloucester regiment relieved what was left of the 2nd Irish Guards and the Coldstream, after three days and three nights of fighting and digging during most of which time they were practically surrounded. The Battalion’s casualties were twenty-seven killed, a hundred missing and a hundred and twenty-three wounded; four officers killed (Captain E. D. Dent, Acting Captain M. B. Levy, Lieutenants J. C. Maher and M. R. FitzGerald); three wounded in the fighting (Captain Bambridge, 2nd Lieutenants F. S. L. Smith and A. A. Tindall) as well as Captain C. Moore on the 16th, and Lieutenant Lord Settrington and 2nd Lieutenant M. B. Cassidy among the missing. Vieux-Berquin had been a battle, in the open, of utter fatigue and deep bewilderment, but with very little loss of morale or keenness, and interspersed with amazing interludes of quiet in which men found and played upon pianos in deserted houses, killed and prepared to eat stray chickens, and were driven forth from their music or their meal by shells or the sputter of indefatigable machine-guns. Our people did not attach much importance to the enemy infantry, but spoke with unqualified admiration of their machine-gunners. The method of attack was uniformly simple. Machine-guns working to a flank enfiladed our dug-in line, while field-guns hammered it flat frontally, sometimes even going up with the assaulting infantry. Meanwhile, individual machine-guns crept forward, using all shelters and covers, and turned up savagely in rear of our defence. Allowing for the fact that trench-trained men cannot at a moment’s notice develop the instinct of open fighting and an eye for the lie of land; allowing also for our lack of preparation and sufficient material, liberties such as the enemy took would never have been possible in the face of organised and uniform opposition. Physically, those three days were a repetition, and, morally, a repercussion of the Somme crash. The divisions concerned in it were tired, and “fed-up.” Several of them had been bucketed up from the Somme to this front after punishing fights where they had seen nothing but failure, and heard nothing but talk of further withdrawals for three weeks past. The only marvel is that they retired in any effective shape at all, for they felt hopeless. The atmosphere of spent effort deepened and darkened through all the clearing-stations and anxious hospitals, till one reached the sea, where people talked of evacuating the whole British force and concentrating on the Channel ports. It does not help a wounded man, half-sunk in the coma of his first injection, to hear nurses, doctors, and staff round him murmur: “Well, I suppose we shall have to clear out pretty soon.” As one man said: “’Twasn’t bad at the front because we knew we were doing something, but the hospitals were enough to depress a tank. We kept _on_ telling ’em that the line was holding all right, but, by jove, instead of them