After making your way along the support line round interminable traverses, you squeezed your way up Timaru to the front line. Thence you went along past Wessex Avenue, which requires no further description, to the end of Locality 12. From here a path led up to the support line--Gap "M" being impassable--and from the support line by another path to the left centre company's front line--quite a decent stretch of bays and traverses with a wilderness of ruined trenches in their rear. Half-way along this sector you turned up a miserable ruin of a trench to Captain Steward's Headquarters, a concrete dug-out set like an oasis in a desert of derelict trenches. In spite of the neighbourhood, Captain Steward would appear perfectly groomed and with a cheerful smile, though denouncing the Germans for making him so uncomfortable. Another dug-out adjoining was used by his subalterns. To visit the left sector it was now necessary to go right down Edmeads Avenue and then up Sussex Avenue, whence you could go to Hobbs Farm along Cambridge or along Fusilier Avenue to Captain Wyatt's Headquarters at Goodwood. The latter was another of these concrete dug-outs, and the owner, whether Captain Wyatt or any other Company Commander, generally had some severe remarks to make about the enemy, who gave the left sector but little rest. To reach "A" Company's front line you went along the support line to Irish Avenue, which from there back to the subsidiary line was good enough, but forward of the support line was hardly better than a track, and, except for some canvas, pretty well exposed to view from all points of the enemy front line. The whole of the left front line, in fact, from Edmeads Farm past Hobbs Farm, the ruins of which had almost been obliterated, was a maze of battered and derelict trenches, only entered by the inquisitive or by some luckless individual who had lost his way. The left company front was built into the side of a small ridge, and possessed no general parados, though most of the posts were self-contained. It ended some two or three hundred yards from the Lys, though from the enemy point of view it probably appeared to go much farther. It was very much knocked about, and it was hard work to maintain even a semblance of respectability. Such is a brief outline of the Houplines sector. Its main features were its size, its maze of useless and ruined trenches, and its lack of lateral communication. There was not a single dug-out that would have stood the direct hit of a 5·9, and only a few that one would have cared to be in when hit by a "whizz-bang."