could be kept in condition as perfect
as if they were at the Stores. The adjutant learnt that his new steed
could indeed buck; but as the afternoon which saw him take a toss
preceded the day on which he left for leave to England, he forgot to be
furious, and went off promising to bring back all sorts of things for
the mess.

Our companion infantry battalion were as gorgeously housed as ourselves
in an adjoining quarry, and at the dinner parties arranged between
their mess and ours reminiscences of Thiepval and Schwaben Redoubt, and
July 1st, 1916, and St Pierre Divion and the Hindenburg Line, brought
out many a new and many an old story.

On the night of March 19th our chief guest was the youthful
lieutenant-colonel who a very few weeks before had succeeded to the
command of the ----. Tall, properly handsome, with his crisp curling
hair and his chin that was firm but not markedly so; eyes that were
reflective rather than compelling; earnest to the point of an absorbed
seriousness--we did right to note him well. He was destined to win
great glory in the vortex of flame and smoke and agony and panic into
which we were to be swept within the next thirty-six hours. My chief
recollection of him that night was of his careful attentiveness to
everything said by our own colonel on the science of present-day
war--the understanding deference paid by a splendid young leader to the
knowledge and grasp and fine character of a very complete gunner.

II. "THE BOCHE IS THROUGH!"

At 5.10 P.M. on March 20 I was in the mess, casting an appraising eye
upon the coloured study of a girl in pink--dark-haired, hazel-eyed,
_tres soignee_, but not too sophisticated, one would say; her beauty of
the kind that glows and tells of abundant vitality and a fresh happy
mind. The little American doctor had sacrificed the cover of one of his
beloved 'Saturday Evening Posts' for this portrait, and with extreme
neatness had scissored it out and fastened it on the wall--a pleasant
change from the cocaine and chocolate-box suggestiveness of the
languorous Kirchner type that in 1916 and 1917 lent a pinchbeck
Montmartre atmosphere to so many English messes in France and Flanders.

The day had been hot and peaceful, the only sound of gun-fire a
six-inch how. registering, and, during a morning tour with the second
lieutenant who had come from one of the batteries to act as temporary
signalling officer, I remembered noting again a weather-beaten civ