Consider for a moment the woes of a battalion headquarters in the field. Late in January, Captain Gordon, the _pukka_ Adjutant, riding to Arras for a bath, canters into a barrage of “heavies” and is wounded in the hand--a vital spot for adjutants. This leaves only the C.O. and the Assistant Adjutant, Lieutenant J. N. Ward, to carry on, and whatever the state of the front, the authorities demand their regular supply of papers and forms. No sooner has the Assistant Adjutant got abreast of things, than all Battalion Headquarters are knocked out in an hour. Luckily, they were only away for three or four days. The enemy added a small and easily beaten off raid to the confusion he had made in Orderly-Room; Major Baggallay took over the command, and Captain Budd, adequate and untroubled as ever, who had held the ghostly F Post on the Scarpe, acted as Adjutant. Officers were beginning to wear out now. Three “of the most tired” were sent down and replaced by substitutes from the Reinforcement Battalion. The following officers joined for duty on the 10th April: Lieutenant M. Buller, Lieutenant (Acting Captain) W. Joyce, Lieutenant Hon. B. A. A. Ogilvy, and 2nd Lieutenants T. B. Maughan, P. R. J. Barry, H. J. Lofting, G. C. MacLachlan and J. C. Haydon. It was on the morning of the 9th April that the enemy opened his second great thrust on the Lys, and the three weeks’ fighting that all but wiped out the Ypres Salient won him Messines, Kemmel, Armentières, Neuve Eglise, Bailleul, Merville, and carried him towards the Channel ports, within five miles of Hazebrouck. That the stroke was expected made it none the less severe. Spring on that front had chosen to be unseasonably dry. The lowlands in the Lys valley, normally their own best defences, gave passage to men and guns when they should have been still impassable. Whatever else may have betrayed them, the Germans had no cause to complain of the weather throughout the war, or indeed of the foresight of their adversaries. They had to deal chiefly with divisions that had been fought out in the Somme Push, reinforced with fillings from England and sent northward in a hurry. Sir Douglas Haig’s despatches give the relative disparity thus: In the Lys battle, prior to the 30th April, the enemy engaged against the British forces a total of 42 Divisions, of which 33 were fresh and 9 had fought previously on the Somme. Against these 42 German Divisions, 25 British Divisions were employed, of which 8 were fresh and 17 had taken a prominent part in the Somme battle.