tage of the change
in defense by a sudden attack after the explosion of a mine, and the men
of the 17th Division, new to this ground, abandoned a position of some
local importance.

General Haldane was annoyed. It was ground of which he knew every
inch. It was ground which men of his had died to hold. It was very
annoying--using a feeble word--to battalion officers and men of the
3d Division--Suffolks and King's Own Liverpools, Gordons and Royal
Scots--who had first come out of the salient, out of its mud and snow
and slush and shell-fire, to a pretty village far behind the lines, on
the road to Calais, where they were getting back to a sense of normal
life again. Sleeping in snug billets, warming their feet at wood fires,
listening with enchantment to the silence about them, free from the
noise of artillery. They were hugging themselves with the thought of a
month of this... Then because they had been in the salient so long
and had held this line so stubbornly, they were ordered back again to
recapture the position lost by new men.

After a day of field sports they were having a boxing--match in an old
barn, very merry and bright, before that news came to them. General
Haldane had given me a quiet word about it, and I watched the boxing,
and the faces of all those men, crowded round the ring, with pity for
the frightful disappointment that was about to fall on them, like a
sledge-hammer. I knew some of their officers--Colonel Dyson of the Royal
Scots, and Captain Heathcote, who hated the war and all its ways with
a deadly hatred, having seen much slaughter of men and of their own
officers. Colonel Dyson was the seventeenth commanding officer of his
battalion, which had been commanded by every officer down to second
lieutenant, and had only thirty men left of the original crowd. They
had been slain in large numbers in that "holding attack" by Hooge on
September 25th, during the battle of Loos, as I have told. Now they
were "going in" again, and were very sorry for themselves, but hid their
feelings from their men. The men were tough and stalwart lads, tanned by
the wind and rain of a foul winter, thinned down by the ordeal of those
months in the line under daily bouts of fire. In a wooden gallery of
the barn a mass of them lay in deep straw, exchanging caps, whistling,
shouting, in high spirits. Not yet did they know the call-back to the
salient. Then word was passed to them after the boxing finals. That
night they ha