d. I was with a Highland officer and we took cover in a
ditch not more than breast high. Shells were bursting damnably close,
scattering us with dirt.

"Let's strike away from the road," said Major Schiach. "They always tape
it out."

We struck across country, back to Arras, glad to get there... other men
had to stay.

The battles to the east of Arras that went before the capture of Monchy
and followed it were hard, nagging actions along the valley of the
Scarpe, which formed a glacis, where our men were terribly exposed to
machine--gun fire, and suffered heavily day after day, week after week,
for no object apparent to our battalion officers and men, who did not
know that they were doing team-work for the French. The Londoners of the
56th Division made a record advance through Neuville-Vitasse to Henin
and Heninel, and broke a switch-line of the Hindenburg system across the
little Cojeul River by Wancourt. There was a fatal attack in the dark on
May 3d, when East Kents and Surreys and Londoners saw a gray dawn come,
revealing the enemy between them and our main line, and had to hack
their way through if they could, There were many who could not, and even
divisional generals were embittered by these needless losses and by the
hard driving of their men, saying fierce things about our High Command.

Their language was mild compared with that of some of our young
officers. I remember one I met near Henin. He was one of a group
of three, all gunner officers who were looking about for better gun
positions not so clearly visible to the enemy, who was in two little
woods--the Bois de Sart and Bois Vert--which stared down upon them like
green eyes. Some of their guns had been destroyed, many of their horses
killed; some of their men. A few minutes before our meeting a shell
had crashed into a bath close to their hut, where men were washing
themselves. The explosion filled the bath with blood and bits of flesh.
The younger officer stared at me under the tilt forward of his steel hat
and said, "Hullo, Gibbs!" I had played chess with him at Groom's Cafe in
Fleet Street in days before the war. I went back to his hut and had tea
with him, close to that bath, hoping that we should not be cut up with
the cake. There were noises "off," as they say in stage directions,
which were enormously disconcerting to one's peace of mind, and not very
far off. I had heard before some hard words about our generalship and
staff-work, but never a