"To begin with, there was no sort of furniture either in the messroom or the anteroom. If you wanted to sit down, you did so on the floor. We each got hold of a large tin mug, and dipped it into a large tin saucepan of soup and drank it, spoons not existing. A large lump of salt was passed round, and every one broke off a piece with his fingers. Next you clawed hold of a piece of bread and a chunk of tongue, and gnawed first one and then the other--knives and forks there were none. This finished the dinner. Add to this two or three tallow-candles stuck on a cocoa tin, and the fact that none of the officers had shaved, or had had their clothes off for a week, and had walked some forty-five miles through rivers and mud, and you will have some idea of how the officers' mess of one of the smartest of Her Majesty's foot regiments do for themselves in time of war. Not a murmur or complaint was to be heard." Their state must certainly have been pitiable, for it will be remembered that on the retirement from Dundee rations for four days only were loaded, and provisions for two months, besides all officers' and men's kit and hospital equipment, were left behind. And, sad to say, so also were the wounded. It was necessary for their future well-being to desert them. The men who had so gloriously led to victory now found themselves stranded and in a strange position--the vanquishers at the mercy of the vanquished! Most melancholy of all must have been the plight of those unhappy sufferers when they first learnt that their comrades were marching farther and farther away, and that they, in all their helplessness, must be left lonely--unloved, and perhaps untended--in charge of the enemy. One dares not think of the agonies of those sad souls--the nation's invalids--bereft of kindly words and kindred smiles; one cannot linger without a sense of emasculating weakness on the sad side-picture of battle that, in its dumb wretchedness, seems so much more paralysing than the active horror of facing shot and shell in company with glorious comrades in arms. Let us hope there was some one to whisper to them, to persuade them that all was for the best; that the safety of their sick selves and their sound mates depended on this retreat, this wondrous retreat which, when the tale of the war in its entirety shall be told, will shine like a dazzling light among records whose brilliancy in the history of British achievements cannot be excelled. Perhaps, too, they had faith to inspire them with the certainty that all that they had suffered in that dark hour for their country and for the weal of their fellows, would be remembered to their glory in the good times to come.