The Bays, under Lieutenant-Colonel "Algy" Lawson, formerly of the Greys, held on like grim death in spite of the storm of shell that burst over them at four o'clock in the morning and continued hour after hour throughout the day. The Life Guards were driven back from their trenches with heavy losses, and the Leicestershire Yeomanry had to fall back as well. This exposed the right flank of the Bays, but still they stuck to their position. At about half past ten o'clock the commanding officer of the 5th D.G.'s ordered the retirement of his regiment, the men trickling back in two thin lines, one at either end of their section of front. This resulted in the left of the Bays being uncovered as well as their right, but they put their teeth in and held on. The 11th Hussars came up magnificently on the left shortly after, and shared the glory, with the Bays, of saving the line. Twice during the day the Huns formed for an infantry attack in front of the Bays, and each time our splendid guns were told of the concentration, and poured shell into the massing Germans with terrible execution, scattering the enemy detachments like chaff before the wind, and thus nipping the attack in the bud. A strong enemy detachment came down the Zonnebeke Road and deployed to the north of it, immediately in front of the Bays. The Boches were lying in the open, but were protected from our rifle and machine-gun fire by a swell of ground. A fat German observation officer obtained a place of vantage in a shattered farmhouse just south of the road. No amount of sniping could dislodge him, though the bullets chipped off bits of brick from the slender stack behind which he was sheltered. Up came a Naval Division armoured Rolls-Royce. Opposite the end of the Bays' trenches it stopped and opened fire. The Hun officer in the farm noted the approach of the car, and fled up the road as fast as he could run. "I had to laugh so much at the funny figure the little fat chap cut, with the tails of his long grey coat flapping straight out behind him as he ran," said one of the Bays to me that night. "I swear it did in any chance I had of hitting him. He got back to his own lot safe, I think, but he did made a holy show of himself doing it." A large number of the enemy were seen concentrating in a wood in front of the Bays toward evening, and again word to our gunners was followed by a bombardment of the group of trees that made immediate evacuation of it the only alternative to sure death. On the extreme left of the cavalry line, the 18th Hussars suffered more heavily than the other regiments of the 2nd Brigade, though the 9th Lancers had many casualties.