Life began to return to the normal. The C.O. left, for a day or two, to command the Brigade, as the Brigadier was down with gas-poisoning, and on April the 25th a draft of fifty-nine men came in from home. Captain A. F. L. Gordon arrived as Second in Command, and Captain Law with him, from England on the 28th. On the 27th they were all taken out of D’Aval Wood and billeted in farms round Hondeghem, north of Hazebrouck on the Cassel road, to strengthen that side of the Hazebrouck defence systems. Continuous lines of parapet had to be raised across country, for all the soil here was water-logged. Of evenings, they would return to Hondeghem and amuse the inhabitants with their pipers and the massed bands of the Brigade. Except for the last few days of their stay, they were under an hour’s notice in Corps Reserve, while the final tremendous adjustments of masses and boundaries, losses and recoveries, ere our last surge forward began, troubled and kept awake all the fronts. They were inspected by General Plumer on the 15th for a distribution of medal-ribbons, and, having put in a thoroughly bad rehearsal the day before, achieved on parade a faultless full-dress ceremonial-drill, turn-out and appearance all excellent. (“The truth is, the way we were put through it at Warley, we knew _that_ business blind, drunk, or asleep when it come to the day. But them dam’ rehearsals, with the whole world an’ all the young officers panickin’, they’re no refreshment to drilled men.”) On the 20th May, when the line of the Lys battle had come to a stand-still, and the enemy troops in the salient that they had won and crowded into were enjoying the full effect of our long-range artillery, there was a possibility that their restored armies in the south might put further pressure on the Arras-Amiens front, and a certain shifting of troops was undertaken on our side which brought the 4th Guards Brigade down from Hondeghem by train to Mondicourt on the Doullens-Arras line, where the drums of the 1st Grenadiers played them out of the station, and, after a long, hot march, to Barly between Bavincourt and Avesnes. Their orders were, if the enemy broke through along that front, they would man the G.H.Q. line of defence which ran to the east of Early Wood, and, for a wonder, was already dug. There is an impenetrability about the Island temperament in the face of the worst which defies criticism. Whether the enemy broke through or not was in the hands of Providence and the valour of their brethren; but the Battalion’s duty was plain. On the 22nd, therefore, they were lectured “on the various forms of salutes” and that afternoon selected, and ere evening had improved, “a suitable site in the camp for a cricket-pitch.” Cricket, be it noted, is not a national game of the Irish; but the Battalion was now largely English. Next day company officers “reconnoitred” the G.H.Q. line. After which they opened a new school of instruction, on the most solid lines, for N.C.O.’s and men.