ed
casualties in one battalion The German gun-fire lengthened, and men were
killed on their way out to "rest"--camps to the left of the road between
Poperinghe and Vlamertinghe.

* * *

On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northumberland Fusiliers--the
old Fighting Fifth--captured six hundred yards of German trenches near
St.-Eloi and asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them who
followed them. Their attack was against a German stronghold built of
earth and sand-bags nine feet high, above a nest of trenches in the fork
of two roads from St.-Eloi to Messines. They mined beneath this place
and it blew up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil in a
black mass. Then the Fusiliers dashed forward, flinging bombs through
barbed wire and over sand-bags which had escaped the radius of the
mine-burst--in one jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get on, to
kill, and to come back. One German machine-gun got to work on them. It
was knocked out by a bomb flung by an officer who saved his company. The
machine--gunners were bayoneted. Elsewhere there was chaos out of which
living men came, shaking and moaning.

I saw the Royal Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusiliers come back from
this exploit, exhausted, caked from head to foot in wet clay. Their
steel helmets were covered with sand-bagging, their trench-waders, their
rifles, and smoke helmets were all plastered by wet, white earth, and
they looked a ragged regiment of scarecrows gathered from the fields of
France. Some of them had shawls tied about their helmets, and some of
them wore the shiny black helmets of the Jaeger Regiment and the gray
coats of German soldiers. They had had luck. They had not left many
comrades behind, and they had come out with life to the good world.
Tired as they were, they came along as though to carnival. They had
proved their courage through an ugly job. They had done "damn well," as
one of them remarked; and they were out of the shell-fire which ravaged
the ground they had taken, where other men lay.

XVI

At the beginning of March there was a little affair--costing a lot of
lives--in the neighborhood of St.-Eloi, up in the Ypres salient. It was
a struggle for a dirty hillock called the Bluff, which had been held for
a long time by the 3d Division under General Haldane, whose men were at
last relieved, after weary months in the salient, by the 17th Division
commanded by General Pilcher. The Germans took advan