“on points.” There would be time and, perhaps, warning to attend to Death when He called. Till then, young and active life was uppermost, and had to be catered for. Indeed, their brigadier remarked of the social side of that boxing entertainment that “it reminded him of Ascot.” But at the back of everything, and pouring in hourly by official or unofficial word, was the news of the changing fortunes of Hooge. Would that postpone or advance the date of the “spring meeting,” not in the least like Ascot, that they had discussed so long? Whichever way war might go, the Guards would not be left idle. On the evening of the 13th June the order came “telling us that we would move up next day to Hooge and take over a section of the line from a Canadian brigade.” They went off in motor lorries, and by the evening of the 15th the Battalion was once more in the packed Infantry Barracks of Ypres where the Canadian officers made Battalion Headquarters their guests till things could be sorted out. Our counter-attack of the 13th June had more or less come to rest, leaving the wrecked plinths of the houses of Hooge, and but very little more, in the enemy’s hands, and both sides were living on the last edge of their nerves. Proof of this came on the night of the 16th, when the Battalion in barracks was waiting its turn. An SOS. went up in the dark from somewhere north of the Menin road, that stony-hearted step-mother of calamity; some guns responded and, all in one instant, both sides’ artillery fell to it full-tongued, while “to make everything complete a gas-signal was given by one of our battalions. A terrific bombardment ensued. Later in the night, the performance was repeated, less the gas-alarm.” The explanation was as simple as human nature. Both sides had taken bad knocks in the past fortnight. Both artilleries, largely increased, were standing by ready for trouble, and what else could one expect—save a detonation? But local rumour ran that the whole Gehenna had been started by one stray ration-party which, all communication-trenches being blown in, was toiling to the front line in the open and showed against the sky-line—quite enough, at that tension, to convince the enemy that it was the head of a fresh infantry attack. The rest came of itself: but the gas-alarm was the invention of the Devil himself. It upset the dignity of all the staffs concerned, for the Brigadier himself, the H.Q. Staff of the Coldstream as well as the C.O. and company officers of the 2nd Irish Guards who were visiting preparatory to taking over the sector, found themselves in one tiny room beneath a brick-kiln, all putting on their helmets at once, and, thereafter, all trying to explain their views of the crisis through them. Some have since compared that symposium to a mass-meeting of unemployed divers; others to a troupe of performing seals.