"Another pace, lads, just another pace."

This order came again and yet again. Before we were through and ready for
the command to advance, we were at least twice five paces each man from his
nearest comrade.

Then it was that our captain told us bluntly that we were obviously
outnumbered by the Germans, ten to one. Then he told us that practically
speaking, we had scarcely the ghost of a chance, but that a bluff might
succeed. He told us to "swing the lid over them." This we did by yelling,
hooting, shouting, clamoring, until it seemed, and the enemy believed,
that we were ten to their one.

[Illustration: LINES AS THEY APPEARED, APRIL 24 BADLY BENT BUT NOT BROKEN]

The ruse succeeded. At daybreak when we rested we found that we had driven
the enemy back almost to his original position. All night long we had been
fighting with our backs to our comrades who were in the front trenches. The
enemy had got behind us and we had had to face about in what served for
trenches. By dawn we had him back again in his original position, and we
were facing in the old direction. By dawn we had almost, though not quite,
forced a junction with the British right.

The night of April twenty-second is one that I can never forget. It was
frightful, yes. Yet there was a grandeur in the appalling intensity of
living, in the appalling intensity of death as it surrounded us.

The German shells rose and burst behind us. They made the Yser Canal a
stream of molten glory. Shells fell in the city, and split the darkness of
the heavens in the early night hours. Later the moon rose in a splendor of
spring-time. Straight behind the tower of the great cathedral it rose and
shone down on a bloody earth.

Suddenly the grand old Cloth Hall burst into flames. The spikes of fire
rose and fell and rose again. Showers of sparks went upward. A pall of
smoke would form and cloud the moon, waver, break and pass. There was the
mutter and rumble and roar of great guns. There was the groan of wounded
and the gasp of dying.

It was glorious. It was terrible. It was inspiring. Through an inferno of
destruction and death, of murder and horror, we lived because we must.

Early in the night the Fighting Tenth and the Sixteenth charged the wood
of St. Julien. Through the undergrowth they hacked and hewed and fought and
bled and died. But, outnumbered as they were, they got the position and
captured the battery of 4.7 guns that had been lost earlier in the day.