Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge--you remember Hooge?--the
14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in shell-
holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst
like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred casualties in
one battalion The German gun-fire lengthened, and men were killed on
their way out to "rest"--camps to the left of the road between
Poperinghe and Vlamertinghe.
* * *
On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northumberland Fusiliers--
the old Fighting Fifth--captured six hundred yards of German trenches
near St.-Eloi and asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them
who followed them. Their attack was against a German stronghold built
of earth and sand-bags nine feet high, above a nest of trenches in the
fork of two roads from St.-Eloi to Messines. They mined beneath this
place and it blew up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil
in a black mass. Then the Fusiliers dashed forward, flinging bombs
through barbed wire and over sand-bags which had escaped the radius of
the mine-burst--in one jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get
on, to kill, and to come back.
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