It was a magnificent piece of work. The Guards were irresistible. They swept like an avalanche over the lost trench, bayoneting their way. All the ground lost was retaken, and another trench besides, while two machine-guns and thirty-two prisoners fell into our hands. It was here that Michael O’Leary performed his prodigious exploit. But the achievements of the Guards were not confined to brilliance in the open with the bayonet. They proved themselves well-disciplined, uncomplaining, resourceful, and patient through the long winter months in the trenches in this sordid region, which vies with the Ypres salient as being the ugliest, wettest, and most depressing portion of our whole line. Neuve Chapelle saw the 1st Grenadiers and 2nd Scots Guards in line with the Seventh Division. The latter stages of that historic fight made great demands on the courage and tenacity of the troops engaged, and these two famous battalions maintained their high reputation for both. The Guards were not engaged in the second battle of Ypres. Their services were required farther south, where the attack on the Fromelles ridge, to support the French “push” in the Artois, was preparing. In the operations which began on May 9, and, continuing with intervals until the middle of June, resulted in the gain of a mile or two of front and the capture of several hundred prisoners, all the brigades in which the Guards are serving were concerned. After the attack by the Seventh Division on May 15 on the German trenches south of Richebourg l’Avoué, the greater part of a company of the 2nd Scots Guards, including Captain Sir Frederick Fitzwygram, was found to be missing. Presently word came down to the brigade--I think from the Canadians, who had taken over the line here--that some Scots Guards’ graves had been located. Would the brigade send up an officer to investigate? An officer was despatched. He was destined to elucidate the mystery of the missing company. He did not find Fitzwygram, who had been wounded and captured. But he found the dead bodies of sixty Scots Guards lying huddled together in the open, the centre of a grim circle of some 200 German corpses, and close by two rough white crosses marking the spot where the Canadians had laid two Scots Guards officers to rest. The Scots Guards, who had advanced side by side with the Border Regiment, had outdistanced their fellows. They were found dead, amid heaps of empty cartridge cases, with their rifles still grasped in their stiffened fingers, in the place where they had last been seen through a drifting haze of high-explosive vapours, standing shoulder to shoulder together under a murderous fire poured in on them from three sides. Soaked by the rain and blackened by the sun, their bodies were not beautiful to look upon, but monarch never had nobler lying-in-state than those sixty Guardsmen dead on the coarse grass of the dreary Flanders plain.