The Guards Division, after their ten days’ rest and clean-up at Sandpits Camp, Méaulte, supplied one brigade to take over a new sector of trench opposite St. Pierre Vaast Wood on the extreme east of things and left their 1st Brigade in reserve at Méaulte, Ville-sous-Corbie, and Méricourt l’Abbé. The latter camp was allotted to the Irish Guards who had to send one company for permanent fatigues to the railway station--all the valley here was one long siding for men and supplies--and another to the back of Bernafay Wood for Decauville construction, while the remainder were drilled and instructed in their specialties. This was the time in our armies’ development when nearly every third man was a “specialist” in some branch or another except, as company officers remarked under their breaths, the rifle and its bayonet. The men’s deferred Christmas dinners (it will be remembered they had been in the line on the day itself) were duly issued by half a battalion at a time in the big cinema-hall in camp, and, lest the transport officer should by any chance enjoy himself, their transport chose this time of rest to develop “contagious stomatitis,” a form of thrush in the mouth, and had to be isolated. Still, setting aside the cold, which does not much trouble well-fed men, the Battalion had some pleasant memories of its rest by the river. Leave was possible; smoking-parties made themselves in the big huts; the sergeants gave a dinner, which is a sure sign of well-being; there were cinemas for the men, and no one troubled himself too much for the noise of the guns ten miles up stream. It is difficult to rediscover a battalion’s psychology at any given time, but so far as evidence goes they had not too black doubts as to the upshot of the campaign, though every platoon kept its loud-voiced pessimists who foretold that they would take root in the trenches for evermore and christened the R.O.D. locomotives “Roll on Duration!” On the 1st February (1917) in “cold bright weather with snow on the ground,” the 1st Brigade were once again in Divisional Reserve near Carnoy, ready to relieve the 3rd Coldstream near Rancourt on the recently taken-over French sector, in trenches a little westerly of St. Pierre Vaast Wood which is under Sailly-Saillisel. In the wood itself lay a dreadful mine-crater of the old days, filled, as it seemed, with dead French Colonial troops--browned and blackened bodies, their white skulls still carrying jaunty red caps. Our wondering patrols used to look down into it sometimes of moonlight nights.