Within a couple of days we had to hand over again. We were leaving that front to go up into the salient, Ypres. But I didn’t forget to tell the in-coming Battery Commander all about that particular gun. Ypres! One mentions it quite casually but I don’t think there was an officer or man who didn’t draw a deep breath when the order came. It was a death trap. There was a month’s course of gunnery in England about to take place,--the Overseas Course for Battery Commanders. My name had been sent in. It was at once cancelled so that the Ypres move was a double disappointment. So the battery went down to the wagon line and prepared for the worst. For a couple of days we hung about uneasily. Then the Major departed for the north in a motor lorry to take over positions. Having seen him off we foregathered with the officers of the Brigade Ammunition Column, cursed with uneasy laughter and turned the rum-specialist on to brewing flaming toddy. The next day brought a telegram from the Major of which two words at least will never die: “Move cancelled.” We had dinner in Estaires that night! But the brigade was going to move, although none of us knew where. The day before they took the road I left for England in a hurry to attend the Overseas Course. How little did I guess what changes were destined to take place before I saw them again! 18 The course was a godsend in that it broke the back of the winter. A month in England, sleeping between sheets, with a hot bath every day and brief week-ends with one’s people was a distinct improvement on France, although the first half of the course was dull to desperation. The chief interest, in fact, of the whole course was to see the fight between the two schools of gunners,--the theoretical and the practical. Shoebury was the home of the theoretical. We filled all the Westcliff hotels and went in daily by train to the school of gunnery, there to imbibe drafts of statistics--not excluding our old friend T.O.B.--and to relearn all the stuff we had been doing every day in France in face of the Hun, a sort of revised up-to-date version, including witty remarks at the expense of Salisbury which left one with the idea, “Well, if this is the last word of _the_ School of Gunnery, I’m a damned sight better gunner than I thought I was.” Many of the officers had brought their wives down. Apart from them the hotels were filled with indescribable people,--dear old ladies in eighteenth-century garments who knitted and talked scandal and allowed their giggling daughters to flirt and dance with all and sundry. One or two of the more advanced damsels had left their parents behind and were staying there with “uncles,”--rather lascivious-looking old men, rapidly going bald. Where they all came from is a mystery. One didn’t think England contained such people, and the thought that one was fighting for them was intolerable.