there’ll be one or two of ’em left--policemen or tram-conductors an’ such like; but in their day an’ time, ye’ll understand, there was nothing could equal them.”) The lighter side of life was supplied by the 3rd Coldstream’s historic and unparalleled “Pantomime,” which ran its ribald and immensely clever course for ten consecutive nights when the cars of the Staff might be seen parked outside the theatre precisely as in the West End. On the 1st May they resumed work on the Etricourt-Fins railroad and made camp among the ruins of the village for the next three weeks in fine hot weather. The officers and N.C.O.’s were exercised freely at map-reading (which on the Somme required high powers of imagination), sketching reports and compass-work and occasionally officers and N.C.O.’s made up a platoon and worked out small tactical exercises--such as the rush-in and downing of a suddenly raised machine-gun after a barrage had lifted. The men were kept to the needs of railway and transport, but it was an easy life in warm, grassy Etricourt after months of mud and torn dirt. A swimming bath was dug for them; there were wild flowers to be gathered, and an orchard in blossom to show that the world still lived naturally, and their work was close to their parade-grounds. Men spoke affectionately of Etricourt where shell-holes were so few that they could count them. A home-draft had brought the Battalion six pipers who on the 4th of May “played at Retreat for the first time,” and thereafter followed the Battalion’s fortunes. As everybody knows, Irish pipes have one drone less than the Scottish, but it is not commonly understood that the piper in his close-fitting saffron kilt plays them almost without any movement of the body--a point of difference that has puzzled very many Scots regiments. That immobility, as the Pipe Major observed on an historic occasion, is “one of the secrets of the regiment.”