Before me at the end of the road, I saw amid trees the village of Warvillers. Many men were going towards it from all directions; and I saw our artillery brigades taking up battery positions to the left. I met two men of the 5th Battalion and we started off to the village together. The place was now in our hands, as the Germans had evacuated it some hours before. The houses were quite intact and offered prospects of pleasant billets. My companions and I, finding it was quite late in the afternoon, determined to go and have our meal in a garden near the Chateau. We sat down on the grass and opened our bully-beef tins, and seeing onions growing in the garden thought it would be a good thing to have that savoury vegetable as a relish. It added to the enjoyment of our simple meal to think that we were eating something which the Germans had intended for themselves. We managed to get some fresh water too from a well nearby, which looked quite clean. On the other side of a wall we could see the roof of the Chateau. One of the men thought he would like to go and explore and find out who was there. He came back a few minutes afterwards and said it was full of Germans. So, taking their rifles, the two men went off to attack it, thinking they had found a stronghold of the enemy. I was just having a smoke after my meal when the lads came back and said that the Germans whom they had seen were our prisoners and that the Chateau had been taken over by us as a dressing station. We made our way to it and found that it was a very beautiful place situated in lovely grounds. A card on a door upstairs bore the inscription, "His Excellency General," and then followed a German name. The place had been the headquarters of some enemy corps or division on the previous day. At the back of the Chateau was a very strong concrete dugout divided off into rooms, which were soon filled by our officers and men. All that night the wounded were being brought to the Chateau, and German prisoners also found their way there. Nobody was paying much attention to the latter, and, thinking it was unwise to let them wander about, and perhaps go back to their lines with information about our location, with (p. 285) the permission of the C.O. of the ambulance, who was up to his eyes in work, I had them all put into one large room over which I placed a guard. They were sent back to the corps cage in the morning. The Germans evidently expected that we would use the Chateau because they dropped some heavy shells in the garden during the night, and we had to get the wounded down in to the cellars in quick time.