"Why in the deuce we don't have more guns up here _I'd_ like to know. It does get sickening to be shelled, and shelled, and shelled, day and night, and hear so little of the same sort of stuff going over _their_ way. Damn the German guns, anyway." I sympathised with him, and told him so. "I would like to see what de Lisle would do if _he_ was running the guns," I told him. "He would send some hell of his own making over to those Huns if _he_ was doing it, from what I have heard him say." Odd prophetic fragment of comfort, that. Three days thereafter de Lisle was given command of the whole Verlorenhoek-Hooge front and all the artillery east of the canal, a territory which he soon had "stiff with guns." In spite of the preponderance of the Germans in heavy ordnance our gunners gave the enemy good packages of the medicine with which our hammered troops had been dosed for so many weary days. The run back over the Menin Bridge and through Ypres safely accomplished, we visited the headquarters of General Snow, commanding 28th Division. While waiting there a Hun howitzer shell ambled lazily over my head and exploded a couple of hundred yards beyond, throwing up a great cloud of black smoke. "Enemy airmen spotted this little lot," said a passing "red-hat." "Warm time coming for Snow." His anxiety was unnecessary, however, for the next shell went much further over us, and another two further still, as if searching for moving troops far behind the line. The 3rd Cavalry Division troopers, loaded in motor-buses, went Ypres-ward during the afternoon. General Sir Julian Byng had taken Allenby's place at Cavalry Corps, and General Briggs had been given command of the 3rd Cavalry Division in Byng's place. The British Army contained no finer soldier than Briggs. This left the 1st Cavalry Brigade without a G.O.C., as General Meakin, who had been appointed to that command, was in England on sick leave. Consequently Colonel "Tommy" Pitman, of the 11th Hussars, was placed in temporary command of the 1st Brigade. Pitman, like Briggs, was a born leader of men--a tower of strength in himself. Once during the afternoon my work took me to Ypres, but not beyond it. A fresh attack was on, and the Boches were sweeping the Menin Bridge and the road beyond with shrapnel. Even Macfarlane's intrepid motor-cyclists could no longer go over it with their signal corps messages; but were compelled to dismount, leave their motor-bikes in Ypres, and proceed on foot to Potijze by a roundabout route through the fields. Those cyclists generally used a road long after it had been given up as impassable by everyone else, and when they at last abandoned it as too dangerous for use it was indeed time, in their parlance, "to give it a miss."