Here hopes and fears fought for the mastery throughout the morning, in accordance with the portents of the day. An order to lift fire on to a more distant point seemed to mean that our attack was developing against it, and the men in the pits paused to cheer in the midst of their unceasing labour. Then suddenly fire would be swept back on to a point that we had determined in our own minds to have been captured long ago, and our spirits fell, the detachments setting their teeth and straining at the heated guns to force by sheer weight of metal the taking of the disputed point. Or, saddest sight of all, down the road flowed an ever-widening stream of casualties, ambulances laden with stretchers upon which twisted forms lay very still, others with the less severely wounded, and a motley crowd on foot with minor injuries, supporting one another as one imagines the scriptural halt, maimed and blind to have done. I think that none of us realized till we saw the magnitude of this stream, how fierce a fight was raging in front of us. If this sight hardened our determination, the next procession went far to cheer us. A few hundred prisoners were marched past us on the way to the rear, fine upstanding men enough, looking perfectly fit and in the prime of life, disposing effectually, in my mind at least, of the fable born of our national love for self-deceit that the enemy were hard put to it to find men fit for service. The German batteries were now devoting their attention to our advancing infantry, endeavouring at the same time to create a barrage behind them on our main arteries of communication. The Harrow Road suffered to a certain extent, but the greatest slaughter took place on the Lens-Béthune and Vermelles-Hulluch roads. On the former the whole of a divisional train was overwhelmed by shrapnel, blocking the road for a quarter of a mile with shattered wagons and dead horses (a picture of which debris subsequently went the round of the illustrated Press under the heading "Captured German Battery at Loos"). Two of our field batteries that endeavoured to come into action in the open between Quality Street and La Chapelle de Notre Dame de Consolation suffered very heavily and were silenced. Of the losses of the infantry, nobody who did not see the procession of casualties and, worse still, the burial parties of the next few days, can form an adequate picture. "British Offensive in the West," we read, "Gain of five miles of trench." Each foot of that five miles cost us a life and a sum of human agony such as this world has never known. Watch that communication trench marked "Stretchers to rear only." Here they come, two stretcher-bearers, one limping painfully, the sleeve of the other growing ever darker with a purple stain that spreads slowly over it. Between them they carry a poor wretch with both legs broken, whose low moan of agony rises to a sharp wail at each jolting step. Supporting