The fighting was still going on around Loos. We could hear the guns in the distance, but it was clear that the thrust had failed and that we were now skirmishing for local advantages. But on October 13th there was a final flare-up; the noise of the guns was so great that even the inhabitants of Annezin, accustomed to these alarms, were properly frightened, and began packing up in case the Germans broke through. Old Adelphine was in tears with fright. Early that afternoon I was in Béthune at the _Globe_ drinking champagne-cocktails with some friends who had joined from the Third Battalion, when the assistant provost-marshal put his head in the door and called out: ‘Any officers of the Fifth, Sixth, or Nineteenth Brigades here?’ We jumped up. ‘You are to return at once to your units.’ ‘Oh God,’ said Robertson, ‘that means another show.’ Robertson had been in D Company and so escaped the charge. ‘We’ll be pushed over the top to-night to reinforce someone, and that’ll be the end of us.’ We hurried back to Annezin and found everything in confusion. ‘We’re standing-to—at half an hour’s notice for the trenches,’ we were told. We packed up hastily and in a few minutes the whole battalion was out in the road in fighting order. We were to go up to the Hohenzollern Redoubt and were now issued with new trench maps of it. The men were in high spirits, even the survivors of the show. They were singing songs to the accompaniment of an accordion and a penny whistle. Only at one time, when a ‘mad-minute’ of artillery noise was reached, they stopped and looked at each other, and Sergeant Townsend said sententiously: ‘That’s the charge. Many good fellows going west at this moment; maybe chums of ours.’ Gradually the noise died down, and a message came at last from brigade that we would not be needed. It had been another dud show, chiefly to be remembered for the death of Charles Sorley, a captain in the Suffolks, one of the three poets of importance killed in the war. (The other two were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.)