themselves on the shoulders of the stretcher-bearers are two more, one with his breath gurgling through a throat choked with blood, one with a shattered shoulder and side. Through the treacherous clay that covers the bottom of the trench they make their way of agony, reeling from side to side as their feet fail to find a foothold, cursing their Maker for the horror of their torture. See, the first stretcher-bearer slips--his wounded foot will bear him no longer--and down falls the whole party in one screaming, writhing mass. Two miles more: is there no end to human suffering? is heaven so pitiless? There is the answer, a sharp whistle, a low report, a puff of smoke just over the trench, and all is quiet, save for one form that crawls very slowly on hands and knees through the yellow clay that grows dark crimson in his track. In these terms must we reckon the price of victory. This is not the place, nor is it within my ability, to give an historical study of the varying phases of the battle. Suffice it to say that by noon the 15th Division had swept through the northern end of Loos, and were engaged upon that part of the eastern slope of the valley known as Hill 70. There had been considerable street-fighting in the village, but the enemy had evidently realized that this was not the place to make a determined stand. Their strategy appears to have been to concentrate their forces on the edge of the valley, leaving within it only detachments of such strengths that the loss occasioned by their sacrifice would be altogether outweighed by the gain in time that they secured to the main defence. And nobly these detachments performed the task allotted to them. One battery took up a position along the Loos-Benifontaine road, and remained in action under a fire whose intensity it is impossible to describe until our troops were almost upon it, when its fire ceased, not from lack of courage to continue, but because no single man was left alive to serve the guns. Let us give the enemy his due, we are not fighting a nation of cowards and assassins, as we are so fond of trying to believe, but of brave and determined men, whom to defeat will call from us our utmost energies.