The most graphic and thrilling narrative of the engagement is given in a letter written home by a second lieutenant of one of the Irish battalions. They were in reserve, five or six hundred yards behind the first line, who were in occupation of the rising slope nearer to Guinchy. It was about four o'clock when they were ordered to move up so as to reinforce the first line. They got up in the nick of time, just as the great charge had begun, and they saw a sight which the officer says stirred and thrilled them to the depths of their souls. "Mere words," he says, "must fail to convey anything like a true picture of the scene, but it is burned into the memory of all those who were there and saw it. Between the outer fringe of Guinchy and the front line of our own trenches is No Man's Land, a wilderness of pits so close together that you could ride astraddle the partitions between any two of them. As you look half right, obliquely down along No Man's Land, you behold a great host of yellow-coated men rise out of the earth and surge forward and upward in a torrent--not in extended order, as you might expect, but in one mass. There seems to be no end to them. Just when you think the flood is subsiding, another wave comes surging up the bend towards Guinchy. We joined in on the left. There was no time for us any more than the others to get into extended order. We formed another stream converging on the others at the summit." He goes on to give a wonderful impression of the spirit of the men--their fearlessness and exuberance which nothing could daunt. "By this time we were all wildly excited. Our shouts and yells alone must have struck terror into the Huns. They were firing their machine-guns down the slope. Their shells were falling here, there and everywhere. But there was no wavering in the Irish host. We couldn't run. We advanced at a steady walking pace, stumbling here and there, but going ever onward and upward. That numbing dread had now left me completely. Like the others, I was intoxicated with the glory of it all. I can remember shouting and bawling to the men of my platoon, who were only too eager to go on."