ion, been wrenched from the German grasp. There is everywhere
about it an awesome sacredness. One hesitates to treat lightly over the
soil that belongs to those whose eyes were closed in the taking, and
whose warrior forms lie at rest beneath the pathetic white crosses
dotted over the gruesome waste. Those sad little emblems of Supreme
Sacrifice: "To the memory of a British Soldier." Simple but magnificent!
A farewell to some unknown--to some mother's son.

The first shell that scatters you in all direction, secretly feeling
yourself doubtfully all over, abruptly disperses any sentimentality that
may cling to the mind. The two Companies found it so when they marched
still further up the line and commenced work on two different sectors,
shelled--but comparatively lightly--for the first day or two.

The first line over-attacked in the mud, swept over Poelcapelle and
advanced on Passchendaele, pausing while the mobile artillery moved up
to support over roads that were daily filled in and rebuilt by fatigue
parties similar to the Guernseys. The German Headquarters concentrated
their guns upon the immediate British rear, with the intention of
hampering and impeding the movements of reinforcements and artillery.

The Guernseys got the cream of it. Ground was churned up for yards and
bodies buried weeks before were blown from their resting places,
grinning white and hideous at the sky. Work on the roads was one
perpetually interrupted operation, men ducking every few minutes to the
whine of a shell. Life was an unknown quantity--no man could gauge what
moments were still left him. Streams of wounded ran, hobbled or limped
painfully away from that sector of Hell. Artillery galloped steaming
horses through, sighing with relief upon attaining the other end.

There comes a time after his first baptism of fire, after his first view
of the shattered mutilated remnants of a shell-stricken body, that the
infantryman turns towards where invisible German guns from comparative
safety belch forth death, and shakes his impotent fist at this enemy. He
picks himself up, white and shaken, from where the concussion has thrown
him, and amid the cries of the dying, "Curse you," he sobs, "if ever the
chance comes----!"

A battery of R.F.A. within a few hundred yards of the road opened
salvoes lasting throughout every morning until the ears throbbed with
each successive roar and the earth trembled violently beneath the
6-in.'s concussion. Jerr