By two o'clock on the morning of the 15th, a British counter-attack was launched. By daybreak each force held some part of St. Eloi, and the fighting grew fierce and fiercer. By night all the town was in British hands save one point, a mound which had been transformed into a kind of fort by the enemy. During that fighting, the 4th Battalion Rifle Brigade was sent up to take a section of trench out of which one of the other 27th Division Battalions had been shelled. Once before, within the hour, another battalion had essayed to recapture the lost position, and had "retired" in considerable confusion. The Rifle Brigade set its teeth and started for the hottest part of the fray. "You must cross that road," its commander was told, "though Heaven only knows how anyone can get across it alive." Sixteen Hun machine-guns were playing on the open space over which the battalion must pass. Over it they went. In less than sixty seconds eleven officers and two hundred and fifty men were down, but the rest pushed on. They reached the trench, some of them, cleared out the Huns with the cold steel, and consolidated the position--a splendid performance. The 5th Corps made good the ground the Germans had won without calling on the 1st Cavalry Division troops for assistance, and thus ended the last chance of our Division for active fighting during the month of March. Inspections in the Flemish mud, bright sunshine and spring zephyrs one day, and snow the next, and more than once snow and sunshine alternating throughout the span of a day, marked the passing of the month. Paris, Calais, St. Omer, Estaires, Lillers, Merville and Hazebrouck were visited by enemy airmen as the days went by, and bombs dropped, but without much damage to lives or property. "The Huns don't care whether or not they hit anything," said one sage "sub." "They only want to show Sir Douglas Haig they have a copy of that March 10th Order of his wherein he said 'Our Flying Corps has driven the Germans from the air.'" On March 25th I spent the morning in Bailleul at 2nd Corps and 3rd Corps Headquarters. The Staffordshire Brigade of the North Midland Territorial Division marched past to the music of their fine brass band, drawn up in the square--the first band I had seen or heard since leaving England seven months before. Crowds of soldiers and officers flocked to hear it and see the sturdy Terriers march by with swinging step. They created a splendid impression. The next day my work was to take General Lowe and General Lumley over the path of the early fighting in Flanders--from Meteren through Bailleul to Armentières, thence to the line on the Ploegsteert Hill and through the Ploegsteert Wood. We stopped in the town of Ploegsteert, where, in the churchyard, General Lumley's son, a gallant young officer in the 11th Hussars, was buried.