On the evening of the 30th May they were taken by train from their camp, _via_ Amiens, Abbeville, and Boulogne and St. Omer to Cassel in thirteen or fourteen hours, and from Cassel marched back along the well-known pavé nearly to St. Omer again and billeted between La Crosse and the dingy wide railway-crossing at Fort Rouge. All the country round was busy raising crops; every old man, woman, and child working as long as light lasted. Their only available training-ground was the Forest of Clairmarais, with its two characteristic wooded hills that stand up behind St. Omer. Here they were taught “wood-fighting” in addition to other specialties, and the mess found time to give a dinner of honour to a friendly Field-Ambulance (Irish in the main) to whom they had, on various occasions, owed much. Scandal asserts that the guests departed, in the dawn, on their own stretchers. Here, too, on the 6th June they entered for the Brigade horse-show and won first prize for the best turned out limber-and-pair, and seconds for water-cart and cooker-and-pair--no small thing when one considers what is the standard of excellence in Brigade transport. On the next day (June 7), the nineteen mines of Messines went up together in the dawn. The three army corps (Second Anzac and Ninth and Tenth Corps) loosed behind them, broke forward over Messines and Wytschaete, and the whole German line from Armagh Wood to Plugstreet was wrenched backwards from a mile to two miles all along. Messines was a singularly complete and satisfactory affair, including some seven thousand prisoners and, better still, a multitude of dead, killed off in counter-attacks. It opened the road for the Third Battle of Ypres which was to win more breathing-space round the wreck of the city. Unlike Arras, where there was almost unlimited space for assembly in subterranean caves and cellars, every preparation in the Salient had to be carried out under the enemy’s eyes on known and registered ground lacking shelter above or below. Thus the attack, which was to cover a front of fifteen miles, demanded as much effort and pre-arrangement as any operation that had till then been undertaken in the whole course of the war. Those were made and carried through among, and in spite of, the daily demands of continuous local operations, with the same thoroughness and fixedness of purpose as when the Brigade competed for its little prizes and trophies at Renescure horse-show. On the 12th June the Battalion marched thirteen miles for musketry to Moringhem in the bare, high down-country behind Acquin, where two men collapsed with heat-stroke. A century ago the drill-book laid down that unaimed battalion-fire from “Brown Bess” should never be opened at over four hundred yards. They practised slow and rapid firing with fixed bayonets at two and three hundred; company sharp-shooters using figures at the same range.