Meanwhile on the extreme left the French had carried out their promise, and had counter-attacked. In conjunction with our gallant Indian troops, who fought most stoutly in this battle, they were able to push the enemy farther north. The French recaptured Lizerne, and made some progress at Steenstraat and Het Sas; but the Germans, profiting by the north-easterly breeze, which unexpectedly held in their favour during the greater part of the three weeks’ fighting, made free use of their gas-fumes, and little real progress was realized. All through the 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th the Germans kept up a tremendous bombardment right round the curve of the salient. Our line now ran from the canal straight across the Ypres-Langemarck Road in front of St. Julien, through Fortuin to Zevenkote, and thence bent round Zonnebeke (for Broodseinde had had to be abandoned), through the Polygon Wood, back to Hill 60. The Germans made full use of their superiority of artillery, and swept the trenches with a never-ending deluge of heavy projectiles and mortar bombs, while all the roads leading through Ypres to the front were sprayed day and night with fire. Not Meissonnier, nor Détaille, nor Werner, nor even Verestchagin, I believe, could have thrown on canvas an adequate impression of the awful ordeal which these endless days of pitiless bombardment imposed on our troops. They could have painted you a picture of the British in the trenches running through green fields and pastures and woods, with the wrecks of cottages and churches dotted about the landscape, and the grey ruins of Ypres, seen through bursts of black and white smoke, in the background. They could have shown you our men, unshorn, unwashed, their eyes shining whitely out of their faces, begrimed, burnt by the sun, standing at the parapet firing steadily, or digging, filling sandbags and piling them up to close the breaches rent in the parapet by the enemy’s shells bursting on every side. They could have shown you the dead, the pitilessly mangled, the hideously limp victims of the shells; they might have conveyed by a touch of the brush the indifference with which men in the firing-line will pass to and fro before the yet warm bodies of their comrades. They could have shown you the wounded, quiet, dull-eyed, the long processions of the stretcher-bearers dodging their way down to houses and barns and churches and stables, where, under the Cross of Geneva, the doctors were working swiftly and silently, without fuss. But they could never have conveyed to you the overwhelming, unimaginable truth--that this little sketch of a few yards of trench must be repeated over miles and miles of front, with the same dusty figures at the parapet, the same headless and armless dead, the same suffering wounded, the same rain of shells, if one would bring home an impression of the second battle of Ypres.