At 9.30 on the night of the 8th, in heavy rain, the Battalion marched from Abingley Camp to their assembly lines (these all duly marked by tapes and white signboards, which, to the imaginative, suggest graveyards) from Elverdinghe to Boesinghe road, up “Clarges Street” to Abri Wood, and then to Cannes farm till they met the guides for their assembly areas at Ruisseau farm. From here began the interminable duck-boards that halt and congest the slow-moving line; and it was not till four in the morning that the Battalion was formed up and moved off. The rain had stopped a little before midnight and a late moon came to their help. The companies were commanded as follows: No. 1, Captain the Hon. P. J. Ogilvy; No. 2, Lieutenant D. S. Browne; No. 3, Captain R. B. S. Reford; No. 4, Lieutenant N. B. Bagenal. There was some shelling as they got into their assembly positions at 5.20 A. M., but casualties were few. The 2nd Grenadiers and 2nd Coldstream led off under a few minutes’ blast of intense fire from field-guns and Stokes mortars, crossed the Broembeek and were away. At 6.20 the 1st Irish Guards and 3rd Coldstream followed them. The Battalion’s crossing-place at the river, which, after all, proved not so unmanageable as the patrols reported, had no bridges, but there was wire enough on the banks to have made trouble had the enemy chosen that time and place to shell. They went over in three-foot water with mud at the bottom; re-formed, wet and filthy, and followed the 2nd Grenadiers who had captured the first and second objectives, moved through them at 8.20 and formed up on the right of the 3rd Coldstream under the barrage of our guns for their own advance on the final objective--the edge of the forest. So far, barring a tendency to bear towards the right or railway side, direction had been well kept and their losses were not heavy. The companies deployed for attack on the new lines necessitated by the altered German system of defense--mopping-up sections in rear of the leading companies, with Lewis-gun sections, and a mopping-up platoon busy behind all.