They were back at La Gorgue again on the 13th January, in divisional rest; the 3rd Guards Brigade relieving them. While there the C.O. launched a scheme for each subaltern to pick and train six men on his own, so as to form the very hard core of any patrols or bombing-parties he might have to lead hereafter. They were specially trained for spotting things and judging distance at night; and the tales that were told about them and their adventures and their confidences would fill several unprintable books. (There was an officer who did not so much boast as mount, with a certain air, a glass eye. One night, during patrol, he was wounded in the shoulder, and brought in by his pet patrol-leader, a private of unquestioned courage, with, by the way, a pretty taste for feigning abject fear when he wished to test new men with whom he was working in No Man’s Land. He rendered first aid to his officer whose wound was not severe, and then invited him to “take a shquint” at the result. The officer had to explain that he was blind on that side. Whereupon, the private, till the doctor turned up, drew loud and lively pictures of the horror of his wife at home, should it ever come to her knowledge that her man habitually crawled about France in the dark with an officer “blinded on the half of him.”) They rested for nearly a fortnight at La Gorgue, attended a lecture—“if not instructive, at least highly entertaining”—by Max Abbat, the well-known French boxer, on “Sport and what England had done for France,” and had a regimental dinner, when ten of the officers of the First Battalion came over from Merville with their brigadier and the Staff Captain, and Lieutenant Charles Moore who had saved the Battalion Christmas dinners, looked after them all to the very end which, men say, became nebulous. Some one had been teaching the Battalion to bomb in style, for their team of thirty returned from Brigade Bombing School easy winners, by one hundred points in the final competition. (“Except that the front line is mostly quieter and _always_ more safe, there is no differ betwixt the front line and Bombing School.”)