d to march seven miles to entrain for the railroad nearest
to Ypres. I saw them march away, silently, grimly, bravely, without many
curses.

They were to recapture the Bluff, and early on the morning of March
2d, before dawn had risen, I went out to the salient and watched the
bombardment which preceded the attack. There was an incessant tumult
of guns, and the noise rolled in waves across the flat country of the
salient and echoed back from Kemmel Hill and the Wytschaete Ridge. There
was a white frost over the fields, and all the battle-front was veiled
by a mist which clung round the villages and farmsteads behind the lines
and made a dense bank of gray fog below the rising ground.

This curtain was rent with flashes of light and little glinting stars
burst continually over one spot, where the Bluff was hidden beyond
Zillebeke Lake. When daybreak came, with the rim of a red sun over a
clump of trees in the east, the noise of guns increased in spasms of
intensity like a rising storm. Many batteries of heavy artillery were
firing salvos. Field-guns, widely scattered, concentrated their fire
upon one area, where their shells were bursting with a twinkle of light.
Somewhere a machine-gun was at work with sharp, staccato strokes,
like an urgent knocking at the door. High overhead was the song of an
airplane coming nearer, with a high, vibrant humming. It was an enemy
searching through the mist down below him for any movement of troops or
trains.

It was the 76th Brigade of the 3d Division which attacked at four
thirty-two that morning, and they were the Suffolks, Gordons, and King's
Own Liverpools who led the assault, commanded by General Pratt. They
flung themselves into the German lines in the wake of a heavy barrage
fire, smashing through broken belts of wire and stumbling in and out of
shell-craters. The Germans, in their front-lines, had gone to cover in
deep dugouts which they had built with feverish haste on the Bluff and
its neighborhood during the previous ten days and nights. At first only
a few men, not more than a hundred or so, could be discovered alive.
The dead were thick in the maze of trenches, and our men stumbled across
them.

The living were in a worse state than the dead, dazed by the shell-fire,
and cold with terror when our men sprang upon them in the darkness
before dawn. Small parties were collected and passed back as
prisoners--marvelously lucky men if they kept their sanity as well
as their