The general impression at Porchester Camp was that the Guards Division would be out of the line for the next two weeks or so, while the Twenty-ninth Division took over their work and secured a jumping-off place on the far side of the Steenbeek, with a new advance, in which the Guards would take part, towards Houthulst Forest. Meantime, sufficient to the day was the camp’s daily small beer—rows, for instance, with company cooks about diet-sheets (this was a matter Greer had been deep in just before his death), an inspection which kept them standing-to for nearly a couple of hours and was then cancelled; a farmer who, meaning to be kind, cut his crops early so that they might have a nice stubbly parade-ground, which no one in the least wanted; a lecture on Boesinghe by the C.O. to Captains Ward and Redmond and Lieutenants FitzGerald and De Moleyns, and all the N.C.O.’s who had come up with the last drafts that were making good the Battalion losses and giving the old hands a deal of trouble. For the enemy had developed at Boesinghe a defensive system of shell-holes filled with a few men and a machine-gun, and further protected by modest flanking machine-gun pill-boxes, over a depth of fifteen hundred or two thousand yards before one got to his main-line system of triple trenches. It was wholly damnable because, as the Guards and the Twentieth and Twenty-ninth Divisions had found out, artillery was not much use against holes in the ground, even when the field-guns could be brought close enough across the morasses to reach them. Warley knew little about the proper forms of attack on such positions, and the new hands had to be taught it under menace of the daring planes. The Hun never threw away an opportunity of doing evil to his enemy, and while they lay at Bedford Camp (August 13) a number of the A.S.C. horses died owing to steel shavings having been cunningly mixed in their baled hay by some pro-Boche agent in the far-off lands where it was purchased. On the 18th August orders came to move up the line to a camp west of Bleuet Farm, where aeroplanes were more vicious than ever. There they had to construct the camp almost from the beginning, with tents and shelters as they could lay hands on them, while most of the Battalion was busy making and mending roads; and a draft of one hundred and fifty new men, under Lieutenant Manning, came in, so that nothing might be lacking to the activity of the days.