en he fell, and darkness was about him, he could only cry to
God or his pals, for he was helpless otherwise. One of our divisions of
Lancashire men--the 66th--took eleven hours in making three miles or
so out of Ypres across that ground on their way to attack, and then, in
spite of their exhaustion, attacked. Yet week after week, month after
month, our masses of men, almost every division in the British army
at one time or another, struggled on through that Slough of Despond,
capturing ridge after ridge, until the heights at Passchendaele were
stormed and won, though even then the Germans clung to Staden and
Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came to a dead halt, and that
Belgian coast attack was never launched.

Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions of that six
months' horror were "exaggerated." As a man who knows something of the
value of words, and who saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders, and
went out from Ypres many times during those months to the Westhoek
Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg and Inverness Copse and
Glencourse Wood, and beyond to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where his
dead lay in the swamps and round the pill-boxes, and where tanks that
had wallowed into the mire were shot into scrap-iron by German gun-fire
(thirty were knocked out by direct hits on the first day of battle), and
where our own guns were being flung up by the harassing fire of heavy
shells, I say now that nothing that has been written is more than the
pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and that no pen or
brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many
of our men perished.

They were months of ghastly endurance to gunners when batteries sank up
to their axles as I saw them often while they fired almost unceasingly
for days and nights without sleep, and were living targets of shells
which burst about them. They were months of battle in which our men
advanced through slime into slime, under the slash of machine-gun
bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives, wet to the skin, chilled to
the bone, plastered up to the eyes in mud, with a dreadful way back for
walking wounded, and but little chance sometimes for wounded who
could not walk. The losses in many of these battles amounted almost to
annihilation to many battalions, and whole divisions lost as much as 50
per cent of their strength after a few days in action, before they were
"relieved." Those were dreadful