Their numbers being so small, none could later boast that he had escaped attention. At the end of the month their 1st Battalion borrowed four lieutenants (Close, Kent, Burke, and Dagger) for duty, which showed them, if they had not guessed it before, that they were to be used as a feeding battalion, and that the 4th Guards Brigade was, for further active use, extinct. On the 9th June, after a week’s work on the G.H.Q. line and their camp, Captain Nugent was transferred as Second in Command to the 1st Battalion, and 2nd Lieutenant W. D. Faulkner took over the duties of Acting Adjutant. On the 11th they transferred to camp in the grounds of Bavincourt Château, a known and well-bombed area, where they hid their tents among the trees, and made little dug-outs and shelters inside them, when they were not working on the back defences. But for the spread of the “Spanish influenza” June was a delightful month, pleasantly balanced between digging and divisional and brigade sports, for they were all among their own people again, played cricket matches in combination with their sister battalion, and wrote their names high on the list of prize-winners. Their serious business was the manufacture of new young N.C.O.’s for export to the 1st Battalion, and even to Caterham, “where they tame lions.” Batches of these were made and drilled under the cold eye of the Sergeant-Major, and were, perhaps, the only men who did not thoroughly appreciate life on the edge of the Somme in that inconceivable early summer of ’18. The men, as men must be if they hope to live, were utterly unconcerned with events beyond their view. They comprehended generally that the German advance was stayed for the while, and that it was a race between the enemy and ourselves to prepare fresh armies and supplies; but they themselves had done what they were required to do. If asked, they would do it again, but not being afflicted with false heroisms, they were perfectly content that other battalions should now pass through the fire. (“We knew there was fighting all about an’ about. We knew the French had borrowed four or five of our divisions and they was being hammered on the Aisne all through May—that time we was learning to play cricket at Barly, an’ _that_’ll show you how many of us was English in those days! We heard about the old Fifth and Thirty-first Divisions retaking all our Vieux-Berquin ground at the end o’ June (when we was having those sports at Bavincourt) an’ we was dam’ glad of it—those of us who had come through that fight. But no man can hold more than one thing at a time, an’ a battalion’s own affairs are enough for one doings.... Now there was a man in those days, called Timoney—a runner—an’ begad, at the one mile and the half mile there was no one could see him when he ran, etc. etc.”)