The right attack, commanded by Captain Hubbard, which was down the old blown-in trench that ran straight towards the centre of the Hohenzollern, was a much tamer affair than the left. The enemy were not struck till our advance was some eighty yards up the cut. They fell back after a few bombs had been exchanged, and our men were able to build a new barricade across the trench fifty yards from their starting-point, with no serious opposition. Their chief difficulty was to clear the newly gained stretch of the hideous mess that choked it, and forced them into the open where the bullets were coming from three sides at once. The men are described as “slow” in settling to this navvy-work, which, considering their distractions, was quite possible. Dawn caught them “with just enough cover to enable them to continue work in a crouching position, and before very many hours of daylight had passed they made it all good.” But their officer, 2nd Lieutenant Hamilton, was shot through the jaw while he was superintending the work (it is impossible to direct and give orders without standing up) and he died an hour later. He was buried on the afternoon of the same day at the lonely, flat little cemetery of Vermelles, which is now so full of “unknown British soldiers killed in action.” As the expert has already pointed out, “there’s not much left over to a bomber that’s missing.” The total loss in the night’s fray was Hamilton killed, Tallents and Synge wounded, and about sixty other ranks killed, wounded, and missing. The net gain was a few score yards of trench, of which the enemy held both ends, with a “No Man’s Land” on either flank of about as far as one could throw a bomb over a barricade. In front, not a hundred yards off, a most efficient German trench with lavish machine-guns sniped them continuously between the breathing-spaces of our shell-fire. Our own big stuff, bursting on and near that trench, shook and loosened the sides of our own. The entire area had been fought over for months, and was hampered with an incredible profusion, or so it struck the new hands at the time, of arms, clothing, and equipment—from shreds, wisps, and clods of sodden uniforms that twist and catch round the legs, to loaded rifles that go off when they are trodden on in the mud or prised up by the entrenching tools. The bottom and sides of the cuts were studded with corpses whose limbs and, what was worse, faces stuck out of the mixed offal, and were hideously brought to light in cleaning up. However, as one youngster wrote home triumphantly, “I was never _actually_ sick.” The affair could hardly be called a success, and the Battalion did not pretend that it was more than a first attempt in which no one knew what was expected of them, and the men were not familiar with their weapons. A REST AND LAVENTIE