"I had to laugh so much at the funny figure the little fat chap cut, with the tails of his long grey coat flapping straight out behind him as he ran," said one of the Bays to me that night. "I swear it did in any chance I had of hitting him. He got back to his own lot safe, I think, but he did made a holy show of himself doing it."
A large number of the enemy were seen concentrating in a wood in front of the Bays toward evening, and again word to our gunners was followed by a bombardment of the group of trees that made immediate evacuation of it the only alternative to sure death.
On the extreme left of the cavalry line, the 18th Hussars suffered more heavily than the other regiments of the 2nd Brigade, though the 9th Lancers had many casualties.
The trenches occupied by the 18th Hussars were blown to bits. Some of the regiment retired to the left into the adjacent trenches of the East Lancashire, and some went back over the open ground in search of the reserve trenches. Failing to find them, the troopers advanced to the ruins of their own line and dug themselves in as best they could, only to be blown out of some parts of the trenches a second time.
The Hospital Corps men could not reach the 18th wounded, as the Huns had a machine-gun trained on the only approach to the trenches. Consequently many men, unable to be moved to a place of safety, were killed as they lay wounded in trench or dug-out.
The right of the cavalry line, from the Ypres-Roulers Railway toward the Menin Road, was in very soft ground.
The 3rd Dragoon Guards, North Somerset Yeomanry, and Royals, of General David Campbell's 6th Brigade, were literally picked up and thrown back by the howitzer shells, while the line was simply blotted out of existence.
The Royals, in reserve, made a charge at 7.30 in the morning that took them to the place where the original trenches had been, but all that remained of them, even at that early hour, were great tumbled piles of earth and mud without semblance of form.
Cecil Howard, Campbell's Brigade Major, was the only officer on the 6th Brigade Staff who was not hit, Campbell himself being slightly wounded.