_Monsieur le patron_, a stubble-cheeked gaffer in shirt and trousers, shambled in; hoped they would be comfortable; shambled out again. Followed, hilariously, Doctor Carson. “Well,” he said, in broadest Belfast, “I’m a proud man this day. We’re in action at last.” Purves arrived; and the mess-box; Gunner Horne the cook, looking rather less cleanly than usual; Peter’s batman, Garton; and the Colonel’s Bombardier Michael, a nervous little fellow, clean-shaven, who had been a footman in private life; finally Caroline with an enormous omelette, a bottle of nameless wine. . . . * * * * * “Make ’emselves damn comfortable, I notice,” growled Lodden that evening, as he left Headquarters for the gun-pits at the foot of the field below the house. “Wish I were on the ruddy Headquarters,” groused Gunner Mucksweat, heaving against the reluctant wheel of “B” Battery’s No. 2 gun. “Me too,” answered his mate, as the axles jammed in the narrow doorway of the pit. But Mr. Stanley Purves, as he watched from his upstairs window, the endless upsoaring of Véry candles; as he heard the occasional crackle of a two-miles distant machine-gun; wished by the Lord Apollo and many other classical deities that he were back at Balliol. For it seemed to Mr. Stanley Purves’ imagination that every lurid flash on the far horizon must be a gun directed unerringly at his personal self: and he envied P.J., who slept soundly and unimaginatively on his camp-bed in the corner of their bare and unprotected sleeping-room. Which paragraph may serve to explain Stanley Purves’ subsequent vogue—among elderly civilians—as a soldier-poet of the let-me-like-a-hero-fall category! § 3 Two evenings later, when Francis Gordon arrived—in a purloined Vauxhall car—to dinner, he found the half-Brigade settled down to desultory action. Already the little house at Annequin, was linked by black “D. 5.” telephone-wires to 7th Artillery Headquarters way back in Sailly-La-Bourse, to the as-yet-unoccupied battle-headquarters at the château of Noyelles a mile on their right. Forward to the gun-pits, and backward to the top of the great Fosse where Straker had established an observation-post in one of the many tunnels burrowed through the slag, ran other wires—very red and new on their supporting poles. Already Lodden and Torrington had spied out the dun plain, the white chalk-furrows; talked learnedly of Hun strong-points—the Pope’s Nose, the Hohenzollern Redoubt. The first “post” had arrived, been sorted eagerly on the bare floor of the Mess-room; Mr. Black had discovered whence to draw rations; guns had barked away enough ammunition to necessitate fresh supplies from Billy Williams’ subaltern Murphy, in charge of the Ammunition Column Section behind Fosse Six; men had seen their first shells crash to ground on the Vermelles road.