They were relieved the same night, though they did not expect it, by the 1/5th Battalion Loyal North Lancs who had not made sure of their route beforehand, and so, in wet darkness, lost their way, failed to meet the guides at the rendezvous, and were heavily shelled. The relief dragged on till well towards dawn, when the battalions straggled off into some drenching trenches without any sort of accommodation. (“The whole thing the most appalling mess and agony I have ever experienced.”) The worst was when a stray light went up and showed the relieved Battalion under pouring rain playing “follow my leader” in a complete circle like caterpillars, in the hopeful belief that they were moving to their destination. They next took the place of the 3rd Guards Brigade in reserve-trenches near Edinburgh Support, where they stayed till the 14th September and were not even once shelled. Salvage and cleaning up was their fatigue--a dreadful job at any time, for the ground was filled with ancient offal as well as new--lost French of ’14 mingled grotesquely with the raw produce of yesterday’s bombing-raid. Yet men’s feelings blunt so by use that they will scavenge yard by yard over the very clay of the pit into which they themselves may at any instant be stamped, nor turn a hair at shapes made last year in their likeness. The Battalion was complimented by its Major-General on the extent and neatness of its dump. No mere campaigning interferes with the Army’s passion for elaborate economies. A little before this, the entire British Expeditionary Force was exhorted to collect and turn in all solder from bully-beef tins and the like. Naturally, the thing became a game with betting on results between corps; but when a dark, elderly, brooding private of the Irish spent three hours stalking a Coldstream cooker with intent to convey and melt it down, every one felt it had gone far enough. On the 15th September they relieved the 1st Scots Guards in the old trenches west of Lagnicourt. There they managed to put in a little box-respirator drill which at the best is a dry fatigue, but, be it noted with gratitude, “beer was obtained for the men and sent up from transport-lines.” The whole area reeked of the various gases which the enemy were distributing with heavies. They hung in the hollows and were sucked up by the day’s heat, and no time or place was safe from them. Gas-discipline had to be insisted on strongly, for even veterans grow careless of a foe they cannot see; and the new hands are like croupy babies. On the 17th September they relieved the 2nd Scots Guards in support, and No. 2 Company took over from a company of the Welsh Guards. Their trenches were in what had been the British front line of the old time--Fish Avenue, Sprat Post, Shark Support, Rat and Rabbit Avenue, and so forth.