All was excitement when I left that front in the small hours of the morning of the 9th, and greatly would I have loved to stay and see the Auber Ridge attack at daybreak. But at early morning light on Sunday, May 9th, the 1st Cavalry Division, placed under the orders of General Plumer, who had taken General Smith-Dorrien's place as the General Officer commanding the 2nd Army, was once more to be sent to Ypres. Things had not gone well in the Salient on the 8th. The 5th Corps, then under General Allenby, who had been promoted from Cavalry Corps, was composed of the 4th, 27th and 28th Divisions. These troops had been driven from their first-line trenches by a strenuous German attack, and had fallen back to the next line with heavy casualties. The 2nd Cavalry Brigade had been rushed early on the 9th into the reserve trenches east of Ypres, and were in readiness from Potijze south to the Menin Road. The 1st Cavalry Brigade and the 9th Cavalry Brigade were near Vlamertinghe, west of Ypres, waiting orders. The Huns had begun a ferocious onslaught on that perfect Sunday morning, and the roar of battle around Ypres drowned, in our ears, the noise of the 1st Army attack towards Aubers. That 9th of May was to see bitter fighting on many fronts. The enemy attack on the Ypres Salient, and our "push" against the Auber ridge, were pregnant with bloody work, but away to the south, in front of Arras, the French Army was commencing the second day of the biggest attack it had yet planned since the winter mud had limited the fighting to trench warfare. Five hundred thousand men and 2,000 guns were hammering at the German front, in an effort to break through to Douai, and though it was too early to expect a detailed report of the onslaught, word had come that the soldiers of France had won through in three places. On the Russian front the German arms were crowned with success on that day, in a gigantic conflict, and the day before saw the sinking of the Lusitania and the sacrifice of its load of women and children. One seemed to live many hours in a few minutes in those May days. All-engrossed with the work in hand, we were none the less anxious to hear of the great movements about us, in which our interests were not less keen than in the fighting in our own immediate area. The new British line around Ypres ran from the French right, 2,000 yards east of the Yser-Ypres Canal, and about the same distance north of St. Jean, east for a mile or so to a homestead dubbed the Canadian Farm, then south-east across the Ypres-St. Julien road, and across another road that previously had served as a secondary route to Passchendaele.