The losses of the Guards in going over to the first objective were not heavy. They preceded the attack by a tremendous trench-mortar bombardment, which so frightened the enemy and caused such loss among them that before the infantry advanced many of them came rushing over to our lines to surrender. On the second objective there was heavy fighting at a strong place called Strode House, which was surrounded with uncut wire and defended by heavy machine-gun fire. The Guards, after being checked, rushed it from all sides and captured it with all its garrison. There was more fighting of the same kind farther south, at ruins close to Houthulst Forest, on the edge of the swamps, which seem to be a No Man's Land, because the ground is too wet for the Germans to live there. Very quickly after the attack the enemy countered heavily on the Guards' left, but the Guards held firm and beat it off.
Farther south the Middlesex, Royal Fusiliers, and the Newfoundlanders of the 29th Division went straight through to their objective as far as Cinq Chemins Farm (the Farm of the Five Roads), and they had to resist a series of counter-attacks, starting before half-past eight in the morning. The first of these was shattered by rifle-fire, and the second by artillery-fire, but afterwards, owing no doubt to heavy shelling, our line withdrew a little in front of the Poelcappelle road.
On the left centre of our attack our progress was not maintained. The ground here was deplorable, as the two streams of the Lekkerbolerbeek and the Stroombeek had been cut through by shell-fire, so that their boundaries were lost in broad floods. Mortal men could not pass through quick enough to keep up with a barrage, and after desperate struggles they were forced to withdraw from the forward positions beyond Adler Farm and Burns House.
Round the village of Poelcappelle, now no more than a dust-heap of ruin, there was fierce fighting, and the enemy held out in the brewery, from which he swept the ground with machine-gun bullets so that all approach was deadly. The Yorkshire men of the 11th Division here made repeated rushes, but without much success, it seems.
Meanwhile, on the extreme right of the attack some very grim and desperate work was being done by English troops of famous old regiments round about Reutel and Polderhoek. At Polderhoek the enemy had a nest of dug-outs and machine-gun emplacements behind the château, and in spite of the assaults of Warwicks and Norfolks held them by unceasing fire.
On the north of Polderhoek success was complete in the attack on Reutel, though the village was defended by machine-guns in a cemetery beyond Reutel, and several defended blockhouses. These were attacked and taken by the H.A.C., Warwicks, and Devons, and our line of objectives was made good beyond Reutel and Judge Copse, which have been thorns in our side—spear-heads rather—for many days.
Splendid and chivalrous work was done on this part of the ground by the stretcher-bearers. Out of two hundred and fifty labouring in these fields over a hundred were hit, and all of them took the utmost risk to rescue their fallen comrades in the fighting-lines. The sappers and the pioneers, the transport and the runners, fought not against the enemy from Germany, but against an enemy more difficult to defeat, and that was the mud.