That night we marched back again to Cambrin. The men were singing. Being mostly from the Midlands they sang comic songs instead of Welsh hymns: _Slippery Sam_, _When we’ve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine_, and _I do like a S’nice S’mince Pie_, to concertina accompaniment. The tune of the _S’nice S’mince Pie_ ran in my head all next day, and for the week following I could not get rid of it. The Second Welsh would never have sung a song like _When we’ve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine_. Their only songs about the war were defeatist: I want to go home, I want to go home, The coal-box and shrapnel they whistle and roar, I don’t want to go to the trenches no more, I want to go over the sea Where the Kayser can’t shoot bombs at me. Oh, I Don’t want to die, I want to go home. There were several more verses in the same strain. Hewitt, the Welsh machine-gun officer, had written one in a more offensive spirit: I want to go home, I want to go home. One day at Givenchy the week before last The Allmands attacked and they nearly got past. They pushed their way up to the keep, Through our maxim-gun sight we did peep, Oh my! They let out a cry, They never got home. But the men would not sing it, though they all admired Hewitt. The Béthune-La Bassée road was choked with troops, guns, and transport, and we had to march miles north out of our way to get back to Cambrin. As it was we were held up two or three times by massed cavalry. Everything seemed in confusion. A casualty clearing-station had been planted astride one of the principal crossroads and was already being shelled. When we reached Cambrin we had marched about twenty miles in all that day. We were told then that the Middlesex would go over first with us in support, and to their left the Second Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, with the Cameronians in support; the junior officers complained loudly at our not being given the honour of leading the attack. We were the senior regiment, they protested, and entitled to the ‘Right of the Line.’ We moved into trench sidings just in front of the village. There was about half a mile of communication trench between us and the trenches proper, known as Maison Rouge Alley. It was an hour or so past midnight. At half-past five the gas was to be discharged. We were cold, tired and sick, not at all in the mood for a battle. We tried to snatch an hour or two of sleep squatting in the trench. It had been raining for some time. Grey, watery dawn broke at last behind the German lines; the bombardment, which had been surprisingly slack all night, brisked up a little. ‘Why the devil don’t they send them over quicker?’ asked The Actor. ‘This isn’t my idea of a bombardment. We’re getting nothing opposite us. What little there is is going into the Hohenzollern.’ ‘Shell shortage. Expected it,’ answered Thomas. We were told afterwards that on the 23rd a German aeroplane had