battering forward against such hopeless odds between October 15 and 31.

                It is easy to describe the purely physical happenings of the Battery's stay in this last Death Valley position, but they are not what stands out in our memories of those days. The thing which none who were there will ever forget is not so easy to describe. It was a mental depression which no one altogether escaped. The trying experience on the road perhaps weakened our nervous resistance more than we realized, and undoubtedly prolonged lack of sleep and dismal surroundings, added to the constant shelling and gassing in the valley, favored this depression which was universal in the Battery. The surrounding were certainly bleak: rusty barbed-wire and shell- torn earth for a foreground, and for a background, blasted hills topped with gaunt fringes of shell-torn trees; wounded men and battered ambulances for­ ever crawling along the tortured, mud-swamped road; broken wagons, smashed caissons, packs, blankets, towels, toilet articles, clothing, letters, dead horses,-—everything trampled into the mud; the whole out­ look desolate and cheerless. The valley at this point was a veritable gas-pocket, for the poisonous fumes being heavier than air, rolled down from all sides and hung in the bottom eighteen hours out of the twenty- four. Being in a salient we were subjected from three sides to a fire which was at times so close as to destroy ammunition piles and even tear down the nets from the guns. There was no shelter near except the shallow holes the men could dig beside the pieces. The result of the whole thing seemed to be a terrible ner-

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