Assuming that the information of our Intelligence Department was correct, the weight of the coming German attack would be delivered to the south of Arras; and that town would be the hinge on which it would turn. Elsewhere along the Somme front, ground might be given if required, but between Arras and Amiens the line, at all costs, must stand; and we are told that, months before the spring of the year, attention was given to strengthening the systems of defence in the rear. It is difficult to discover how many of the precautions taken were made with serious expectation of trouble, and how many were, so to say, fitted into statements published after the events. Men who were on that front speak of most of the back-trenches and reserve-lines as inadequate. The truth may be that no one believed the British collapse would be so swift or so catastrophic as it was. On New Year’s Day, Colonel Alexander, commanding, went on leave, and was succeeded by Major R. H. Ferguson. The Battalion, reconstituted and replenished, marched to Arras Gaol, which was always regarded as a superior billet in cold weather, as the only shelling that mattered took the south-east end of the town. Their work for the next few weeks was to occupy and prevent the enemy from raiding into the system of trenches and posts on the Scarpe to the east of Arras at and round Fampoux and Rœux. Their experiences there were precisely the same as those of the 1st Battalion. It was, as we know, a variegated, swampy, and in places overlooked, stretch of works which had been used as a front line almost since the beginning of the War, and was paved with odds and ends of ancient horrors as well as thoroughly soaked with remains of tear and other gas in the support-lines. Their first turn began on the 2nd January when they relieved a battalion of Gordon Highlanders in bitter cold weather, and settled down to the business of wiring and cleaning-up. A small excitement was the shelling of the left company by trench-mortars, to which our guns replied but in their zeal cut our own wire. The frost so far kept the trenches standing up, but, as none of them were revetted, it was obvious that the next thaw would bring them all down. Then the duck-boards froze and turned to ice, and the C.O., slipping on them, fell and strained himself so badly that he had to go to hospital. Food apart, there was little comfort or decency in that work of shovelling and firming dirt, and shivering day and night in their dry or sodden clothing. Their rests at Arras were complicated by the necessity of looking out for enemy aeroplanes, which forbade them drilling more than one company at a time; and men grow vastly wearied of standing about and fiddling with small duties in a constricted town. The Battalion was so reduced in strength, too, that two companies together made little more than an ordinary platoon. However, in spite of knowing each other to the limits of