and the floor knee-deep in plaster and
rubbish. Of the kitchen there was still less; and nothing was to be
rescued from the debris except one tin plate and one tin mustard-pot.
It would have taken days to clear it, for a good deal of the room
above seemed to have fallen into it as well, and one could hardly get
in at the door, so full was the place of plaster, wreckage, and
stones, and hot-water pipes and bits of iron and twisted rails, and
dust and earth and broken laths and rafters. Luckily the concussion
put the fire out, or there might have been still more damage.

We spent our day somewhat uncomfortably in the dug-out, for there was
a hard frost and very little room to turn round in, and though we had
a brazier, its charcoal fumes in the confined space nearly poisoned
us. In the middle of the day three French officers turned up, and we
made mutual arrangements for the taking over by them of this portion
of the line, Milling (of the Bedfords) guiding one party and St Andre
the other.

Food was rather a difficulty, for the mess servants had disappeared,
and had last been seen hastening in the direction of Ypres--for which
we cursed them loud and long. We did our best with small hunks of
bully and odd bits of chocolate and a modicum of tea and biscuits in
our haversacks--for all the rest of our food had been buried by that
infernal shell,--but it was neither comfortable nor filling; and, in
truth, as the dark winter evening came on with only one or two
candle-stumps between us, we were not as happy as we should otherwise
have been.

Help was, however, at hand; for our servants, Inskip and Stairs, who
we thought had ignominiously run away, suddenly turned up with heaps
of food. They had gone all the way to our cook's waggon three miles
the other side of Ypres for comestibles, and whilst we were d--ing
their eyes for bolting, were trudging, heavily laden, along the road
back to us--good youths.

It was a lengthy business getting the relief through. The French
troops, due at 7.30 P.M., did not arrive till 9.15 P.M., and even then
it was difficult to pilot a lot of troops, fresh to the ground, in
pitch darkness, over shell-holes and wires and broken trees and
stumps, and through mud and undergrowth and dead horses, &c., &c.,
into the trenches destined for them. The details had to be very
carefully arranged indeed, and it was not till nearly 2 A.M. that we
had got the French into the trenches, the Worcesters into rese