time when the first day broke and found the Pozieres position practically ours, the enemy turned his guns on to it. Hour after hour--day and night--with increasing intensity as the days went on, he rained heavy shell into the area. It was the sight of the battlefield for miles around--that reeking village. Now he would send them crashing in on a line south of the road--eight heavy shells at a time, minute after minute, followed up by burst upon burst of shrapnel. Now he would place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through a lift of fog. Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's. Day and night the men worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand--building up whatever it battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again and again and again. What is a barrage against such troops! They went through it as you would go through a summer shower--too proud to bend their heads, many of them, because their mates were looking. I am telling you of things I have seen. As one of the best of their officers said to me, "I have to walk about as if I liked it--what else can you do when your own men teach you to?" The same thought struck me not once but twenty times. On Tuesday morning the shelling of the day before rose to a crescendo, and then suddenly slackened. The German was attacking. It was only a few of the infantry who even saw him. The attack came in lines at fairly wide intervals up the reverse slope of the hill behind Pozieres windmill. Before it reached the crest it came under the sudden barrage of our own guns' shrapnel. The German lines swerved away up the hill. The excited infantry on the extreme right could see Germans crawling over, as quickly as they might, from one shell crater to another, grey backs hopping from hole to hole. They blazed away hard; but most of our infantry never got the chance it was thirsting for. The artillery beat back that attack before it was over the crest, and the Germans broke and ran. Again the enemy's artillery was turned on. Pozieres was pounded more furiously than before, until by four in the afternoon it seemed to onlookers scarcely possible that humanity could have endured such an ordeal. The place could be picked out for miles by pillars of red and black dust towering above it like a Broken Hill dust-storm. Then Germans were reported coming on again, as in the morning. Again our artillery descended upon them like a hailstorm, and nothing came of the attack. During all this time, in spite of the shelling, the troops were slowly working forwards through Pozieres; not backwards. Every day saw fresh ground gained. A great part of the men who were working through it had no more than two or three hours' sleep since Saturday--some of them none at all, only fierce, hard work all the time.