"I shall never forget the first night attack," writes Bombardier N. Tully of the R.F.A. "We had many guns in position—apparently more than the Kaiser's hordes bargained for. They came on out of their trenches shouting, 'Hoch! hoch! hoch!' but a few minutes afterwards they were screaming and cursing. Our shrapnel was mowing them down wholesale. . . . We gave them a bit of old England that night; the din of the guns and rifles was indescribable. We had a few spasmodic attacks the next few nights, but they gave me the impression that they were half-hearted and discouraged. I think it is the enemy who is fighting an uphill battle now. Our fellows are full of confidence in the final result.
"I am awfully glad I am British. It does one good to see how cheerful our boys are, no matter how bad the weather; but, like me, I am sure they will long for the slaughter to cease, and to return to the best bit of land under the sun."
"It is the shell fire," wrote a correspondent, "which has made the Battle of Ypres a test of endurance such as no army has experienced before. Officers and men say that it has been ten times worse than on the Aisne. It has been persistent, and it has been deadly. Day and night there has been a succession of 'Oompahs,' 'Oompees,' 'Bowlers,' and 'Pipsqueaks'—'Oompahs' being the big shells, 'Oompees' the smaller ones, 'Bowlers' the projectiles thrown by trench mortars,[112] and 'Pipsqueaks' shrapnel. Atkins has a name for them all. The soil around Ypres is not a holding soil, but shifty and difficult to trench—unlike that on the Aisne—and constantly the trenches were being blown in by shells."
A private in the Honourable Artillery Corps tells an amusing story. "The first time we manned the front trenches," he says, "we had just got in—it was, of course, pitch dark—and we were peering cautiously about to see where we were. There were a few weird noises and strange lights, and I moved towards our corporal to ask him something, when suddenly a wild, unearthly wail went up apparently at my very feet. My blood ran cold, and I grasped him by the hand. 'What was that?' I cried. 'You're standing on a cat, I think,' he replied. And, indeed, I was! What it was doing there I don't know, but it remained with us off and on all day.
"Later, when it was dark, there was a German attack on our left. We were ordered to man our trench, and then suddenly the order came along, 'Sights at zero,[113] and fire low.' We waited, quivering with excitement, when all at once I saw something feeling its way cautiously over the trench in front of me. I sprang up to bayonet whatever came. It was not only a cat, but the same old cat! Twice it had pulled my leg in twenty-four hours."