These things and their sports and boxing competitions, where Drill-Sergeant Murphy and Private Conroy defeated two black N.C.O.’s of a West Indies battalion, were interludes to nights of savage bombing; carrying and camouflage parties to the front line, where they met a new variety of mustard gas; and the constant practice of the new form of attack. The real thing was set down now for the 14th September but was cancelled at the last moment, and the Battalion was warned for an ordinary trench tour on the night of the 12th-13th. Unluckily, just before that date Captain Sassoon and Lieutenant Kane and twenty-seven men of a big fatigue a day or two before, were badly burned and blistered by the new mustard gas shells. It put them down two officers at the time when every head was needed. They were to take over from the 3rd Coldstream on the 12th September on what was practically the old Boesinghe sector. That battalion which lay next the French had just been raided, and lost nine men because their liaison officer had misunderstood the French language. Hence an order at the eleventh hour that each battalion in the sector should attach a competent linguist to the liaison-post where the two armies joined. The advance across the Steenbeek, after Boesinghe, had only gone on a few hundred yards up the Staden railway line and was now halted three thousand yards sou’west of Houthulst Forest, facing a close and blind land of woods, copses, farms, mills, and tree-screened roads cut, before any sure advance could be made, less than a quarter of a mile from the Guards divisional front by the abominable Broembeek. This was more a sluit than a river. Its banks were marsh for the most part; and every yard was commanded by hostile fire of every kind. On the French right and our extreme left was a lodgement of posts the far side of the Broembeek which the Coldstream had been holding when they were raided. These lay within a hundred yards of the enemy’s line of strong posts (many lectures had been delivered lately on the difference between lines of trenches and lines of posts), and were backed by the stream, then waist-deep and its bed plentifully filled with barbed wire. Between Ney Copse and Ney Wood, say five hundred yards, they could only be reached by one stone bridge and a line of duck-boards like stepping-stones at the west corner of Ney Copse. The Battalion went up in the afternoon of the 12th September, none the better for a terrific bombardment an hour or two before from a dozen low-flying planes which sent every one to cover, inflicted twenty casualties on them out of two hundred in the neighbourhood, and fairly cut the local transport to bits. The relief, too—and this was one of the few occasions when Guards’ guides lost their way—lasted till midnight.