lives after all that hell about them. Hours later, when our
battalions had stormed their way up other trenches into a salient
jutting out of the German line and beyond the boundary of the objective
that had been given to them, other living men were found to be still
hiding in the depths of other dugouts and could not be induced to come
out. Terror kept them in those holes, and they were like wild beasts
at bay, still dangerous because they had their bombs and rifles. An
ultimatum was shouted down to them by men too busy for persuasive talk.
"If you don't come out you'll be blown in." Some of them came out and
others were blown to bits. After that the usual thing happened, the
thing that inevitably happened in all these little murderous attacks and
counter-attacks. The enemy concentrated all its power of artillery on
that position captured by our men, and day after day hurled over storms
of shrapnel and high explosives, under which our men cowered until many
were killed and more wounded. The first attack on the Bluff and its
recapture cost us three thousand casualties, and that was only the
beginning of a daily toll of life and limbs in that neighborhood
of hell. Through driving snowstorms shells went rushing across that
battleground, ceaselessly in those first weeks of March, but the 3d
Division repulsed the enemy's repeated attacks in bombing fights which
were very fierce on both sides.

I went to General Pilcher's headquarters at Reninghelst on March 4th,
and found the staff of the 17th Division frosty in their greeting, while
General Pratt, the brigadier of the 3d Division, was conducting the
attack in their new territory. General Pilcher himself was much shaken.
The old gentleman had been at St.-Eloi when the bombardment had begun on
his men. With Captain Rattnag his A. D. C. he lay for an hour in a ditch
with shells screaming overhead and bursting close. More than once when I
talked with him he raised his head and listened nervously and said: "Do
you hear the guns?... They are terrible."

I was sorry for him, this general who had many theories on war and
experimented in light-signals, as when one night I stood by his side in
a dark field, and had a courteous old-fashioned dignity and gentleness
of manner. He was a fine old English gentleman and a gallant soldier,
but modern warfare was too brutal for him. Too brutal for all those who
hated its slaughter.

Those men of the 3d Division--the "Iron Division," as it w