amps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by
duck-boards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and
tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom
their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud
which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort
anywhere between Dickebusch and Locre.

IV

The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish
Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under
concentrated gun-fire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the
Guards who followed them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to
part of a communication trench (on the southeast side of the earthworks)
nicknamed "Big Willie," near another trench called "Little Willie." Our
enemies forced their way back into some of their old trenches in this
outpost beyond their main lines, and in spite of the chaos produced by
our shell-fire built up new parapets and sand-bag barricades, flung out
barbed wire, and dug themselves into this graveyard where their dead and
ours were strewn.

Perhaps there was some reason why our generals should covet possession
of the Hohenzollern redoubt, some good military reason beyond the spell
of a high-sounding name. I went up there one day when it was partly ours
and stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench parapets and
upheaved chalk, dazzling white under a blue sky, and failed to see any
beauty in the spot, or any value in it--so close to the German lines
that one could not cough for fear of losing one's head. It seemed to me
a place not to gain and not to hold. If I had been a general (appalling
thought!) I should have said: "Let the enemy have that little hell of
his. Let men live there among half-buried bodies and crawling lice, and
the stench of rotting flesh. There is no good in it for us, and for him
will be an abomination, dreaded by his men."

But our generals desired it. They hated to think that the enemy should
have crawled back to it after our men had been there. They decided to
"bite it off," that blunt nose which was thrust forward to our line.
It was an operation that would be good to report in the official
communique. Its capture would, no doubt, increase the morale of our men
after their dead had been buried and their wounded patched up and their
losses forgotten.

It was to the 46th Midland Division that the order of assault was
given on October 13t