On the 9th May they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers on the left sector of their Brigade’s front at Wieltje, where what were once trenches had been bombed and shelled into a sketchy string of bombing-posts--or as a man said, “grouse-butts.” It was perhaps one degree worse than their stretch at Hooge and necessitated companies and posts being scattered, as the ground served, between what was left of Wieltje, St. Jean, and La Brique. The enemy opened by shelling the Reserve Company (No. 4) at St. Jean and wounding eight men, while their machine-gun fire held up all work in the front line where No. 1 Company was trying to dig a communication-trench through old dirt and dead to No. 2 Company in support. The demonstration might have meant anything or nothing, but to be on the safe side and to comply with Brigade orders, regular observation and snipers’ posts were posted henceforward, and Lieutenant Rodakowski was struck off all trench duties as “Intelligence (and Sniping) Officer.” The arrangements and supervision of a dozen or so snipers, imaginative, stolid or frankly bored, as the case might be, and the collation of their various reports based (for very little could be actually seen) on the Celtic imagination operating at large; the whole to be revised and corrected from hour to hour by one’s own faculties of observation and deduction; make Intelligence work a little strenuous. On the 12th May St. Jean, which included Battalion Headquarters, half way between St. Jean and Wieltje, was heavily shelled for eight hours of the night with heavy stuff--but no casualties beyond a couple of men wounded. On the 18th May, when they were in the line once more, the enemy who had recently been remarkably quiet made an attempt to rush a bombing-post, but, says the Diary, “Lieutenant Tisdall and 4182 Private A. Young came upon them unexpectedly, and owing to the former’s coolness and the latter’s vigorous offensive action with rifle and bombs, the hostile party, about twenty, fled.” The Diary is never emotional in such little matters as these, and the officers concerned say less than nothing. It is the old-timers among the men who cherish memories of the “vigorous offensive” action. No pen dare put on paper the speech of the orderly who, with rifle and bomb, erupts along the trench or over the edge of the shell-crater either in deadly silence or with threatenings and slaughter in his own dialect, and, when the quick grisly business is over, convulses his associates with his private version of it. The orderly got the D.C.M. and the officer the Military Cross. The enemy retaliated next night by shelling the support line and wounded seven men just as the Battalion was going into rest and was relieved late, which they noticed with deep displeasure, by a battalion of the Twentieth Division.