Women were working, or gossiping at the doorsteps. The _estaminet_ doors were flung wide open, and the floors were being scrubbed and sprinkled with sawdust. A little bare-legged girl, in a black cotton dress, was hugging a great wide loaf; an old man sat blinking in the sunshine; cats were basking, dogs nosing about lazily. A party of about thirty bombers passed me, the sergeant giving “eyes right” and waking me from meditations on the eternal calm of cats. Then I reached the headquarter guard, and the sentry saluted with a rattling clap upon his butt, and I did my best to emulate his smartness. So I passed along all the length of the shuttered houses of Morlancourt. “A great day, this,” I thought, as I came to the small field where “B” Company was paraded; not two hundred and fifty men, as you will doubtless assume from the text-books, but some thirty or forty men only; one was lucky if one mustered forty. Where were the rest, you ask? Well, bombers bombing; Lewis gunners under Edwards; some on “permanent mining fatigue,” that is, carrying the sand-bags from the mine-shafts to the dumps; transport, pioneers, stretcher-bearers, men under bombing instruction, officers’ servants, headquarter orderlies, men on leave, etc. etc. The company sergeant-major will make out a parade slate for you if you want it, showing exactly where every man is. But here are forty men. Let’s drill them. Half were engaged in arm-drill under my best drill-sergeant; the other half were doing musketry in gas-helmets, an unpleasant practice which nothing would induce me to do on a sunny May morning. They lay on their fronts, legs well apart, and were working the bolts of their rifles fifteen times a minute. After a while they changed over and did arm-drill, while the other half took over the gas-helmets, the mouthpieces having first been dipped in a solution of carbolic brought by one of the stretcher-bearers in a canteen. These gas-helmets were marked D.P. (drill purposes), and each company had so many with which to practise.