Waiting for them were clean clothes, which had been boiled and disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food and rest, and newspapers and tobacco and gossip--but chiefly rest and the joy of lethargy as tissue was rebuilt after the first long sleep, often twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back from fatigue to the glow of strength. Those who came out of the trenches quite “done up,” Colonel Bate, Irish and genial, fatherly and not lean, claimed for his own. After the washing they lay on cots under a glass roof, and they might play dominoes and read the papers when they were well enough to sit up. They had the food which Colonel Bate knew was good for them, just as well as he knew what was deadly for the inhabitants whom they brought into that isolated room which every man must pass through before he was admitted to the full radiance of the colonel’s curative smile. When they were able to return to the trenches, each was written down as one unit more in the colonel’s weekly statistical reports. In summer he entertained _al fresco_ in an open air camp. XVI IN NEUVE CHAPELLE British advance--The human stone wall moves--Neuve Chapelle “on the map”--The travelled British army--A demolished trench-- Stray bullets--The intelligence system--A captured spy-- Old friends--Power of the British artillery--Front line breastworks--Business-like readiness--A cosy house--A ticklish walk--Glowing braziers--“How do they feel in the States?”-- The Rhine or Berlin?--The passing of the “Soldiers Three”--The modern Tommy--Capturing a helmet. Typical of many others, this quiet village in a flat country of rich farming land, with a church, a school, a post-office, and stores where the farmers could buy a pound of sugar or a spool of thread, employ a notary, or get a pair of shoes cobbled or a horse shod, without having to go to the neighbouring town of Béthune, Neuve Chapelle became famous only after it had ceased to exist--unless a village remains a village after it has been reduced to its original elements by shell-fire. It was the scene of one of those actions in the long siege line which have the dignity of a battle; the losses on either side, about sixteen thousand, were two-thirds of those at Waterloo or Gettysburg. Here the British after the long winter’s stalemate in the mud, where they stuck when the exhausted Germans could press them no farther, took the offensive, with the sap of spring rising in their veins.