although
he recovered, never came back to us.

[Footnote 20: This is a fact, though I cannot explain it.]

During the chief hours of the day, when not (or whilst) being shelled,
we were pretty busy with telegrams and reports and queries and
excursions and alarums. We were comfortable enough in the
housekeeper's room, and got our meals "reg'lar," and we even had two
or three arm-chairs, and newspapers and mails fairly well, and news
from outside, which used to arrive with our rations at 9 P.M. or
thereabouts. But a minor trial was the fact that two out of our five
panes of glass had been blown in by shell, and let in an icy draught
on most days. So we got some partially-oiled paper, and made some
paste, and stuck up the panes.

The first shell explosion made the paper sag, the second made it
shiver, and the third blew it out. The paste would not stick--it was
the wrong sort of flour or something.

Then we used jam--that glutinous saccharine mess known as "best plum
jam"--and blue sugar paper, and it stuck quite fairly well. But it
wouldn't dry; and tears of jam used to trickle down the paper panes
and mingle with the tin-tacks and the bread-crumbs on the sill.

The room was even then fairly dark, but the shell-bursts again
shivered the jam paper and burst it, and we had to take to cardboard
and drawing-boards. This made it still darker, and was not even then
successful, for the explosions still shook the boards down and
eventually broke another pane: it was most trying. On the last day but
one four panes had been broken, and on the last day, as will be
recounted, all were broken and the whole window blown in. Then we
left.

But what was of much vaster interest, of course, than these trifles,
was the desperate fighting which was being waged along our front,
not 1000 yards from the chateau. Our two battalions, being entrenched
in the wood, did not receive such a severe hammering as the brigades
on either side--the 7th and 9th respectively on our right and
left,--who were more in the open. And the shelling and attacks on them
were incessant, as well as on troops still further off on the other
side of them.

The 11th November was a typically unpleasant day. It started with a
touch of comedy, Weatherby arriving stark naked in my room at 6.30
A.M., just when I was shaving, saying, "I say, sir, may I finish my
dressing in here? They're shelling the bathroom!" He had a towel and a
few clothes on his arm, _et p