The enemy did not let us remain in peace for long. After a few days’ shelling, during which it was observed that his 6-inch howitzers were “registering,” at 5.30 on the morning of May 8, he made a sledgehammer attempt to smash in the front of the 5th Corps. He started as usual with a terrific bombardment from north of Passchendaele and from Zonnebeke, which gradually concentrated on the front of the 28th Division between north and south of Frezemberg. The General commanding this division told me that it was the most terrible bombardment he had ever listened to. The German shooting was marvellously accurate, and their guns simply wiped out our trench line. “This fire,” in the blunt phrase of Sir John French’s despatch, “completely obliterated the trenches and caused enormous losses.” It was an awful ordeal. The men who came out of it alive told me in awed voices that the shelling was like machine-gun fire, an incessant rain of high-explosive shells that fairly plastered the whole of the ground. The din was ear-splitting, the earth trembled, the air was unbreathable with the fumes from the explosives, and in the space of a minute or two the trenches were reduced to broken heaps of rubbish crowded with dead and wounded men. At one place a trench became impassable with the dead, so the survivors filled it in and planted a cross on top--surely the finest grave for a soldier! A heavy infantry attack followed the bombardment. It was too much for our men. Some battalions had been for a fortnight in the firing-line without the chance of a wash (“A lick and a promise was all the cleaning up we did,” a Colonel of one of these battalions said to me afterwards, “and, by Jove! it was a long promise”), with a scant supply of drinking-water, and salt beef and hard biscuit the only food. Most wires were cut, and the only connection between the firing-line and the Brigade Headquarters in many cases was by orderly. The gallantry of the despatch-bearers in these terrible days was beyond all praise. They were shot down by the dozen, but there were never lacking volunteers “to have a shot” at getting through when no word had come back from the last man sent back.