From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917

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d by men who live, now very young, and then with hair as white as the snow which now lies in No Man's Land, because of its unforgettable pictures in sunlight and moonlight, its fant

nd wondered what joke was on among the Canadian troops. It was one of those jokes which belong to the humours of this war, mixed with blood and death. Up in the Canadian trenches there were shouts of hoarse laughter, as over their khaki a hundred brawny young Canadians put on the night-dresses. They had been tied up with blue ribbon. The old moon, so watchful there in the steel-blue sky, had never looked down upon a stranger scene than these white-robed soldiers who wen

em night after night through the white glimmer of the snowfields. They have taken dogs into the trenches now to give a quicker and surer warning than young sentries, who are afraid to cry out when they see white figures moving, because they think they see them always, when shadows stir in the moonlight across the snow. Our men during recent nights have heard these dogs givi

me battlefields which was once the burial-place of a prehistoric man and is now the tomb of young soldiers in the Durham Light Infantry who fought and died there. The moon was bright on the snow about them, but a misty vapour was on the ground. Each man had been warned not to cough or sneeze. Their rifles were loaded, and with bayonets fixed, so that there should be no rattle of arms or clicks of bolts. They were in two parties, and their orders were to overthrow the advanced German posts which were known to be in front of the Butte, and to form a ring of posts round the position attacked while its dug-outs were being dealt with. A heavy bar

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nn Stanford's Geog^

destroyed. Then the Gordons went on to the Butte de Warlencourt. Underneath it were the dug-outs of a German company, snow-capped and hidden. The Scots went round like wolves hunting for the way do

he others would not surrender. Some bombs and a Stokes shell were thrown down the doorways, and suddenly this nest of dug-outs was seen to collapse, and black smoke came u

wired enclosure, the machine-gun was troublesome. Some of the white smocks fell. An attempt was made to rush it, but failed. Afterwards the gun and the team were knocked out by a she

ly two hours afterwards a loud explosion was heard across the way, as though a bomb store had blown up. The sky was red over