e immediately motored to Worsley. So here I am in
a nice cosy bed in the spacious mansion of the Egertons of
Ellesmere--Worsley Hall. What vicissitudes one does go through!" ...

* * * * *

So, as far as the writer of this book was concerned, Ypres and all that
its name implies was now but a memory: I was safely back on the right
side of the water once again. My feelings on leaving "Wipers" behind me
can best be expressed in the words which a poet of the 55th Division
dedicated to the British Soldier in the second number of _Sub Rosa_:

"Good-bye, Wipers! though I 'opes it is for good,
It 'urts me for to leave yer--I little thought it would.

When I gets back to Blighty, and all the fightin's done,
Mebbe the picters of the past will rise up, one by one.

Like movies at the Cinema, they'll bob up in my brain,
The places that I knew so well--I'll see them all again.

The battered-in Asylum; the Prison scorched and scarred;
And 'ole Salvation Corner with the guns a bellowin' 'ard.

The muddy, ruddy, Ramparts; the mist upon the Moat;
The grey Canal between whose banks no barges ever float.

An' them Cathedral ruins--O Gawd, the fearsome sight!
Like mutilated fingers they points up through the night.

The blighters what relieves us--we'll treat 'em fair an' kind,
They're welcome to the soveneers what we 'ave left be'ind.

Good-bye, Wipers! though I 'opes it is for good,
It 'urts me for to leave yer--I little thought it would."

It was with a thrill of pride that I read in the newspapers during the
following days of the magnificent achievement of the 55th Division--of
the "Lancashire Men's Great Fight:" "Stubborn in attack and withdrawal."
I read of heroic fights round Pommern Castle, of Wurst Farm being
captured by a gallant young officer, and, particularly, the case of: "An
officer who was left last out of his battalion to hold out in an
advanced position (who) said to the padre who has just visited him in
hospital, 'I hope the General was not disappointed with us.'" The
General, I am sure, was not disappointed with these Lancashire men. No
one could think of them without enthusiasm and tenderness, marvelling at
their spirit and at the fight they made in the tragic hours--because it
was a tragedy to them that, after gaining all the ground they had been
asked to take, and not easily nor without losses, they should have to
fall back and fight severe re