Before we went to sleep, good news came from the French. All the way from Loos south to Lens, it said, and on through Thelus to Arras, the German first-line trenches had been captured, save in two places. On the 10th, the French reported having taken 2,000 prisoners and ten guns. In spite of all, the succeeding days' reports whittled down the final result to a tactical success, not a strategical one. The break in the German line was made good by the enemy in short order, and soon Gaul and Teuton were facing each other much as they had done, previously, and the inch-by-inch battles of the Labyrinth were soaking the ground of France's black country with French and German blood. The big French attack and the British "push" had equally failed to smash the German line. On our front British soldiers were to continue to show that their line could hold as solidly as the Hun line had held to the south, in spite of the hell of howitzer-fire that was daily to be let loose in the Salient. Rocked to sleep by the earth-tremble of bursting tons of high explosive, day-dawn on May 10th seemed to come the next moment after my head had hit the floor which served me as a pillow. Before seven o'clock in the morning I was again in the Salient and once more under shell-fire. Taking Colonel Home through Ypres and over the Menin bridge, we were not long in reaching Potijze. The weather was perfect, hundreds of small birds hopping about the roadways and twittering excitedly, as if protesting to each other against the continual coming of the shells. Behind a ruined house near the Potijze crossroads, I made a lucky discovery. Someone had built a comfy little dug-out, six feet by four and nearly three feet deep, into which I at once repaired. Its earthen walls were reinforced by heavy planks, and a roof of earth-covered timbers was edged with barrels and sacks of bricks and mortar. Ponchos lined the inside of the walls, and the floor was deep with straw. On a shelf stood the remains of a ham bone and a tin half full of marmalade. With thirty to forty jarring explosions in the vicinity every minute, this habitation was little short of ideal, save for the smell, which was fierce in its intensity and persistence. The earth of the open spaces near by was thrown into yellow and brown heaps by the hundreds of howitzer shells that had rained on them for days. Dozens of dead horses, scattered about, offended the eye and polluted the air. A detachment of troopers, bent on rendering the trenches of the near by G.H.Q. line a more safe shelter, had been spied by the Hun gunners, who for hours sent a continual shower of shells over them. I had not waited long before I found I was not the only occupant of my shelter. My companions bit me surreptitiously, leaving red blotches which burned irritatingly.