The Marriott was destined to have a curious history. As these pages will show, I got my "Blighty" in a fortnight all right. Meanwhile the book was on its way from England. It arrived after I had left the shores of France behind, me. I never received it. Kenneth Martin visited me in hospital at Worsley Hall in August and told me that he had sent it. I had to tell him that it had not reached me. When I returned to the Battalion in the spring of 1918, Padre Newman informed me that a book had come out for me after I had been wounded, that he had read it with much interest, and that it was now in the custody of Captain J. C. Latter, M.C. Latter was one of the original 2/5th officers who had been wounded in 1916 and who returned to the Battalion immediately after the Third Battle of Ypres, in August, 1917, and succeeded Reginald Andrews as Adjutant. But when Padre Newman told me this Captain A. H. G. Griggs, M.C., was Adjutant and Latter was away with Sir Herbert Plumer in Italy. However, Latter returned once more in the summer of 1918, and mentioned that he had a book belonging to me; but he disappeared again--first on to the Brigade Staff and then to a Staff job further away--as suddenly as he had reappeared. I did not see him again until we were both once more in civilian clothes, and I called at the Barracks at Bury one August afternoon in 1919. He again mentioned the Marriott, remarking that he had discovered it in his kit in August, 1917, and had not the faintest idea how it had got there! FOOTNOTE: [7] Edward James Martin, Second-Lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders, afterwards killed in action, December 1917. CHAPTER XII THE CITY AND THE TRENCHES After the bombardment of Ypres there still remained seven more days before our memorable nineteen days' sojourn in the ghastly Salient was to end. And memorable those days certainly were. Nearly every day brought with it some fresh adventure. For any boy who, like this boy, craved for excitement, and, while hating war theoretically and disliking it temperamentally, was not blind to the romance and grand drama of it all, there was ample satisfaction in the Great War; and perhaps on no other sector of the line did all the factors which are conducive to excitement obtain as they did in the dead city of the Salient and the shell-ploughed fields around it. My diary of July 14 carries on as follows: