eturned for good to the Chateau at
St Jans Cappel.

For this mercy the despatch riders were truly grateful. Sitting the
whole day in the tavern, we had all contracted bad headaches. Even
chess, the 'Red Magazine,' and the writing of letters, could do nothing
to dissipate our unutterable boredom. Never did we pass that tavern
afterwards without a shudder of disgust. With joyous content we heard a
month or two later that it had been closed for providing drinks after
hours.

Officially the grand attack had taken this course. The French to the
north had been held up by the unexpected strength of the German defence.
The 3rd Division on our immediate left had advanced a trifle, for the
Gordons had made a perilous charge into the Petit Bois, a wood at the
bottom of the Wytschaete Heights. And the Royal Scots had put in some
magnificent work, for which they were afterwards very properly
congratulated. The Germans in front of our Division were so cowed by our
magniloquent display of gunnery that they have remained moderately quiet
ever since.

After these December manoeuvres nothing of importance happened on our
front until the spring, when the Germans, whom we had tickled with
intermittent gunnery right through the winter, began to retaliate with
a certain energy.

The Division that has no history is not necessarily happy. There were
portions of the line, it is true, which provided a great deal of comfort
and very little danger. Fine dug-outs were constructed--you have
probably seen them in the illustrated papers. The men were more at home
in such trenches than in the ramshackle farms behind the lines. These
show trenches were emphatically the exception. The average trench on the
line during last winter was neither comfortable nor safe. Yellow clay,
six inches to four feet or more of stinking water, many corpses behind
the trenches buried just underneath the surface-crust, and in front of
the trenches not buried at all, inveterate sniping from a slightly
superior position--these are not pleasant bedfellows. The old Division
(or rather the new Division--the infantrymen of the old Division were
now pitifully few) worked right hard through the winter. When the early
spring came and the trenches were dry, the Division was sent north to
bear a hand in the two bloodiest actions of the war. So far as I know,
in the whole history of British participation in this war there has
never been a more murderous fight than one of these two