given six biscuits each the crew of the Hirose were put back in their boat. The survivors of the Victoria were ordered on deck and placed in the same boat. The submarine steamed away and shortly afterward dipped.

It was very dirty weather at this time. A strong gale blew and the rain drenched them. There were fourteen men crowded in a small trawler boat, a hundred miles from home. By dint of baling out the water continually, till their arms were numbed, they managed to keep afloat. Twenty-four hours later, at 6 o'clock in the morning, they were picked up by the collier Ballater about sixty miles off the Smalls Lighthouse. Their condition was then indescribable. Soaked through and through, with the boat half full of water, battered to and fro by every wave, they had lost all hope, and were lying exhausted. Their bodies were stiff with cramp, and they were hauled on board the Ballater with difficulty. But there, at least, they found the rough comfort of the sea. Each man was stripped and his clothes dried in the engine room. Hot coffee and food and blankets kept them alive till they reached port.

But the ordeal had left its mark upon them all; and when examined as to his experiences on board the submarine, the boatswain of the Victoria-a man of over sixty years-seemed to be too dazed to give any coherent reply. All that he could remember was the scene on the deck of the Victoria before the crew took

to the sea; and his description was that of a shambles, where six of his mates lay drenched with blood, some with their heads blown off, others screaming in agony, with arms and legs blown off; and in a chaos of escaping steam and wreckage the little boy Jones lying dead on the bridge.

The sinking of these fishing boats suddenly ceased, except on rare occasions; and, for certain reasons, it is now an acknowledged fact that when a submarine sees one it submerges or bolts immediately. Details must not be given; but these smaller fishing boats now form a class to themselves, and they are known among the other auxiliaries as mystery ships." Only one hint I may give here. There was once upon a time a simple fishing boat shooting her fishing nets for simple fish. A submarine appeared and gave her men "five minutes, you swine!" Immediately there was a panic, which had been part of their drill in port. Two of the crew went on their knees for mercy, and others hauled at the boat like men possessed. * I must pass over the details once more; but the resultant picture was this: A dummy boat on deck in four pieces, and a fine big gun leveled straight at the submarine, attended by gunners of his Majesty's navy "like gods in poor disguise." There were two Germans kneeling for mercy; and after they had scrambled into safety there was an abolished submarine and oil upon many troubled waters.

**

F

IGHTING on the Somme has con

tinued with unabated fury

throughout the month just past. The British and French armies, which come shoulder to shoulder near Combles, have kept up their slow, steady, forward push, with the constant accompaniment of a smashing hail of great shells which no defenses can withstand. At Bouchavesnes on Sept. 13 General Foch's men achieved what the Germans had believed impossible-they broke through the last line of the original German system of fortified trenches. Walls of reinforced concrete, powerful earthworks, vast mazes of barbed wire-all had been pounded into chaos. New trenches, of course, had been built behind the old, but the significance of the achievement remains. The last month also was marked by the appearance of a new type of armored motor car, which promises important results.

In the first two and one-half months of this offensive the Allies have taken 54,000 German prisoners, some thirty-odd villages, and a devastated section of France nearly thirty miles long and five or ten wide. The aggregate losses in killed and wounded are necessarily heavy on both sides.

Stubborn Thiepval

Two or three crises of more intense battle are seen to flame up from the level of the month's events. Around the fortified village of Thiepval, at the north end of the British sector, some of the fiercest fighting of the war has raged for weeks. On Aug. 21, after a bombardment of indescribable intensity, the British infantry went over the ground in waves across the tangled web of trenches and redoubts, capturing 200 prisoners and establishing themselves within a few hundred yards of the beleagured German garrison of Thiepval; yet a full month later those heroic Germans still hold the Thiepval bills. The quality of their resistance may be guessed from this description of

the bombardment of Aug. 21, which is typical of many others since then:

"Suddenly, as if at the tap of a baton, the great orchestra of death crashed out. It is absurd to describe it; no words have been made for a modern bombardment of this intensity. One can only give a feebly inaccurate notion of what one big shell sounds like. When hundreds of heavy guns are firing upon one small line of ground and shells of the greatest size are rushing through the sky in flocks and bursting in masses, all description is futile. I can only say that the whole sky was resonant with waves of noise that were long drawn, like the deep notes of violins, gigantic and terrible in their power of sound, and that each vibration ended at last in a thunderous crash. It seemed as if the stars had fallen out of the sky and were rushing down to Thiepval."

Work of French Guns

While the British were pounding thus with strokes of Thor at the northern end of the Picardy front, the French were wiping out German trenches to the south along thirty miles of front with a storm of steel that lasted seventy-two hours. An artillery Lieutenant detailed to watch a small section of German trench tells what he saw:

"At first there was a series of earth fountains along the trench line, followed by great cones of smoke, which slowly collected over the wood itself, until the latter was hidden. Through glasses I could see that whole sectors of trench had closed up, burying the defenders. Constantly human limbs and bodies were visible among the upthrown earth and débris. At intervals a gray-green form would leap swiftly backward from the trenches, but the hazard from the incessant rain of steel fragments was too great, and gradually there grew a line of motionless bodies among the brushwood. I counted thirty-seven after threequarters of an hour.

After eighty minutes I signaled, 'trench demolished,' and the bombardment ceased. I would have defied any one to point out where the trench had been. There was nothing but a line of hollows, hillocks, and shell holes. As the smoke cleared, I saw how excellent had been the aim on the communication trenches. Two open roads, each twenty feet wide, had been blasted through the wood. It was only the bodies, lying thick along both, that showed they had indeed been communication trenches.

"I continued to watch. Here and there a wounded wretch dragged himself painfully amid the tree stumps. Perhaps a few survived in the deepest dugouts, but as a practical unit the half battalion had ceased to exist. And, remember, that was a tiny sector. Add the total of such cases along the whole front, and you will realize why our victory is certain."

An Old-Style Battle

Near the centre these operations came to a dramatic climax on Sunday, Sept. 3, in the pitched battle that wrested Guillemont from the Germans on the British sector and gave the French near Clery the greatest victory since the offensive began. It was a battle of the old-fashioned kind in the open, a battle with bayonets between great forces. Between Maurepas and Clery, where the bloodiest fighting occurred, the French faced the Second Army Corps of Bavarians, crack troops ever in the forefront of battle, and next to them on the north was the Third Division of the German Imperial Guard under command of the Prince of Prussia. Opposite the British front the Kaiser's heroic Brandenburgers fought to hold Guillemont fought fiercely, and failed. Nearly 80,000 of Germany's finest troops met this historic AngloFrench assault and had to give way.

The French reached the outskirts of Combles and remained firmly intrenched on the plateau overlooking the BapaumePeronne State road. Further south they gained a footing on Hill St. Quentin, dominating Peronne itself. More important still was the moral effect of having proved that not even Germany's best troops, in equal or superior numbers, and fully prepared for attack, could check a

The Fight for Guillemont

The British, at their end of the line, were fighting in like manner for Guillemont. Aviators who looked down upon the scene saw it as a mad football scrimmage of struggling figures. At midday the British went forward steadily in waves after a hurricane of fire from

their heavy guns. The Germans flung 10,000 gas shells at them, enveloping them in poisonous vapors for hours, and German machine guns swept the ground with a storm of bullets; but the British took cover in the dips and hollows of the shell-tortured earth and reached the vil

lage.

For two weeks Guillemont had been the most completely devastated spot on the western front, for the British had been pounding it with every calibre of gun. It had ceased to be a village and become an iron and lead mine. More than 200,000 shells had burst in this once quiet hamlet of French homes, and 3,000,000 bullets had traversed the junk heap that now remained.

Twice the British had charged into and through the town, only to be forced out by the Germans. Now, sapping forward and connecting up the shell craters into trenches, they worked their way again to the village. The Germans, however, had established themselves in a small trench salient forty yards away, where the British guns dared not fire on them for fear of hitting their own men. Here the Germans had a machine gun that swept the English trenches; but the Britons and Irish, defying it, dashed through, cleaned out the nests of other machine guns in the village, and took up a strong position beyond in a sunken road.

South of Guillemont, one section of the Prussian Guard resisted desperately in Falfemont Farm and wedge wood, and