The peace of Monchy did not last long. At nine o'clock the enemy shelled the place fiercely, and for a long time, with 5·9 guns, as I saw myself at midday from Observation Ridge, which was also under fire.
German airmen, flying above, watched our cavalry and infantry, and directed fire upon them. They were terrible hours to endure, but our men held out nobly; and when the enemy made his counter-attacks in the afternoon and evening, advancing in waves with a most determined spirit, they were hosed with machine-gun bullets and fell like grass before the scythe. Our 18-pounders also poured shell into them. This morning our men are in advance of the village, and the enemy has retreated from the trench below. The night was dreadful for men and beasts. Snow fell heavily, and was blown into deep drifts by wind as cold as ice. Wounded horses fell and died, and men lay in a white bed of snow in an agony of cold, while shells burst round them. As gallant as the fighting men were the supply columns, who sent up carriers through blizzard and shell-fire. At four o'clock in the morning a rum ration was served out, "And thank God for it," said one of our officers lying out there in a shell-hole with a shattered arm. Strange and ironical as it seems, the post came up also at this hour, and men in the middle of the battlefield, suffering the worst agonies of war, had letters from home which in darkness they could not read.
That scene of war this morning might have been in Russia in midwinter, instead of in France in spring-time. Snow was thick over the fields, four foot deep where it had drifted against the banks. Tents and huts behind the lines were covered with snow roofs, and as I went through Arras this poor, stricken city was all white. Stones and fallen masonry which have poured down from great buildings of mediæval times were overlaid with snow--until, by midday, it was all turned to water. Then our Army moved through rivers of mud, and all our splendid horses were pitiful to see.
The enemy's Headquarters Staff is clearly troubled by the successes gained by our troops during these first days of the battle of Arras, and all attempts to repair the damage to his defensive positions upon which his future safety depends have been feeble and irresolute. It is certain that he desired to make a heavy counter-attack upon the northern edge of the Vimy Ridge. Prisoners taken yesterday all believed that this would be done without delay. The 5th Grenadiers of the Prussian Guards Reserve were hurriedly brought up to relieve or support the Bavarian troops, who had suffered frightfully, and massed in a wood, called the Bois d'Hirondelle, or Swallows' Wood, in order to steal through another little wood called Bois-en-Hache to a hill known by us as the Pimple, and so on to recapture Hill 145, taken by the Canadians on Monday night after heavy and costly fighting. This scheme broke down utterly. Swallows' Wood was heavily bombed by our aeroplanes, so that the massed Prussians had an ugly time there, and yesterday morning Canadian troops made a sudden assault upon the Pimple, which is a knoll slightly lower than Hill 145, to its right, and gained it in spite of fierce machine-gun fire from the garrison, who defended themselves stubbornly until they were killed or captured. At the same time Bois-en-Hache, which stands on rising ground across the little valley of the River Souchez, was attacked with great courage by the 24th Division, and the enemy driven out.