garden.) This latter, then, was the post which the Battalion was to attack. Accordingly, they rehearsed the play very carefully with ten men under Lieutenant F. Pym, who had strict orders when they should rush the post, to club the Germans, “trying not to kill them (or one another).” They were to “collar a prisoner and hurry him back if well enough to walk,” and, incidentally, as illustrating the fashion of the moment, they were all to wear “brown veils.” With these stage-directions clear in their mind, they went into the line on the 16th May, after a quiet relief, and took over from the Coldstream the sector from Railway Wood, the barricades across the railway, the big dug-out which had been an old mine, under Railway Wood, and disposed their reserves near Hell Fire Corner and the Menin road. It was ground they knew and hated, but since they had last eaten dirt there, our own listening-post, which had been the point of departure for the Coldstream patrol, on whose reports the raid would be based, had been withdrawn one hundred and fifty yards down the railway line. Apparently no one had realised this, and the captain (Platt) of the Coldstream Company, who had this sector when the 2nd Irish Guards relieved, had been killed while out wiring a couple of nights before. Consequently, that patrol had reconnoitred _inside_ our own front; had mistaken our own wire for the German, had followed it to one of our own disused posts, and had seen and heard a listening-post of the 2nd Grenadiers which they, quite logically, assumed to be German and reported as such. Everything fitted in like a jigsaw puzzle, but all was based on a line which had been shifted—as the Battalion perceived the moment they took over the sector. So there was no attack with clubs and brown veils by the 2nd Irish Guards on the 2nd Grenadiers’ listening-post then, or afterwards, and the moral of the story was “verify your data.” (“No living man could tell from one day to the next—let alone nights—which was our line and which was Jerry’s. ’Twas broke an’ gapped and turned round every way, and each battalion had its own fancy-trenches dug for to make it worse for the next that took over. The miracle was—an’ how often have I seen it!—the miracle was that we did not club each other in the dark every night instead of—instead of when we did.”)