n. In the first case, after the first surprise gas attack a
rent about a mile and a half wide had been torn in the Allied
line. Against a vast number of German troops there was opposed
only one single division of what Bernhardi contemptuously termed
"Colonial Militia," namely, the Canadians. For quite a long time
there were no other troops of ours (save a few oddments) in the
vicinity. The Boche had five miles or so to get to "Wipers." Of
these he covered just about two, and even that ground was only
what he gained in the first surprise of his gas attack. Between
him and the Channel coast there still stretched a khaki line. The
same sort of situation was repeated several times during the
second battle of Ypres (though the odds were never so great as in
these first April days), yet the result was always the same.

Take Verdun again. For me this prolonged battle has a strange
fascination. There is something more terrible and primitive about
it than about any other struggle of the War. It was a sort of
death-grip between two antagonistic military conceptions.

(_The remainder of this letter never came to hand._)

_March 31st, 1917._

It must be a singular experience for our troops on the Somme to
miss enemy artillery fire, trench mortars, grenades, etc., from
the scheme of things. What a huge relief to the Infantry to have
a pause from the eternal "Whew-w-w-w-Crash" of the high
explosives! I fear, nevertheless, that the British infantrymen
will soon resume acquaintance with them, for the War isn't over
by a long chalk yet. Meanwhile, however, the sight of an at
present comparatively unblemished countryside must be a great joy
to men sick of the howling wilderness created on the ground that
has been contended for since July, 1916. I know those Somme
battlefields--every square yard of soil honeycombed with
shell-holes, all traces of verdure vanished, trees reduced to
withered skeletons, blasted forests, fragments of houses, with
the poor human dead rotting all around. Verily a nightmare
country.

You may have remarked in the last _Alleynian_ a poem called the
"Infantryman," by Captain E. F. Clarke. It appeared first in
_Punch_ some time ago and has had a great vogue. When I read it
first, before