Our 2nd Brigade troops were under intermittent shell-fire all that day, but came through with unusual good fortune. One shell lit in a group of 18th Hussars, killed five and wounded eight, but the other units escaped with extraordinarily few casualties. At the headquarters of General Bulfin, Commanding 28th Division, Lord Loch, who was G.S.O. 1, on General Bulfin's Staff, gave us a very welcome tea. From one of the 28th Division Staff I learned that the 4th, 27th and 28th Divisions had been through a more terrible time in the Salient than we had known. Snow's Division, the 27th, were terribly depleted in numbers. "Not many men left, and very few officers indeed," was the sober way Snow had spoken of his lot that day. The five heavy attacks of the 9th, in spite of the battered condition of the heroic men who faced them, resulted in no real gains and the Germans suffered severe losses. We sought eagerly for news of the British attack along the Auber ridge. Early in the morning word had come that the 8th Division had made a splendid beginning by taking the German first line trenches in front of them. In the afternoon we heard that the 4th Corps "got on" well, but the Indian Corps and 1st Corps were held up by machine-gun fire and had made no progress. A further attack was to be made at 4 p.m. on the 10th. On the 11th, the G.H.Q. information summary remarked, laconically, that there was "nothing to report from the 1st Army Front." So the big attack, of which my gunner friends along the Fromelle Road had such hopes, had fizzled out. Weeks afterwards I heard the full story from the lips of men who were in the front of the fighting, but our task in Ypres was growing hourly sufficiently absorbing, so that the whys and wherefores of Rawlinson's failure to break through were of less interest than the question of repelling the German attack on the Salient. As dusk drew on the conflagrations in Ypres lit up the eastern sky. Our night headquarters were in a château not far west of the unfortunate town. Wounded still straggled back in small groups, and ambulances arrived every few minutes at a dressing station hard by the gates of our château. Watching those ambulances unload made me proud to be an Anglo-Saxon. The men were magnificent in their incomparable morale. Many a smiling face hid teeth set hard in pain. Many a Tommy knows not only the inestimable value of keeping a stout heart to help himself through, but the immeasurably greater treasure of an ample store of cheery words and light-hearted jokes wherewith to lift a comrade from pain-racked despondency. Broken bodies, broken limbs, and many a broken head were there in plenty, but one looked far to find a broken spirit.