From Ovillers-la-Boisselle to the north the German line, thanks to its clouds of machine-guns, had not been shifted by our attack, and the Battalion came, for the time being, under the orders of the Twenty-fifth Division (7th Brigade) which lay against the southern shoulder of the Gomiecourt salient just where the sweeping bare uplands break back to the valley of the Authies. They were turned in to dig trenches on the sector, four or five miles from their bivouac in the little wood to the south of Mailly-Maillet. They left the crowded Lucheux camp in lorries at three on the afternoon of the 1st August (“In those days we knew we were for it, but we did not know what the Somme was going to be”), reached bivouac at eight, marched to their trenches and came back at daybreak with one N.C.O. and four men wounded. It was a most gentle introduction to the scenes of their labours. The enemy were using shrapnel mostly part of the 3rd August; 2nd Lieutenant Hordern was dangerously and eight men were slightly wounded by one shell while at work. Second Lieutenant Vaughan joined on this date and was posted to No. 2 Company. Whether, as some said, the authorities did not know what to do with them for a few days, or whether they were part of a definite scheme of attack, no one cared. The machine had taken possession of their lives and fates, and as they went from trench to bivouac and back again they could both see and hear how extremely little a battalion, or for that matter a brigade, mattered in the present inferno. The fortnight’s battle that had opened on the 14th of July had finished itself among erased villages and woods that were already all but stumpage, while the big guns were pounding the camps and bivouacs that held our reserves, and one stumbled on old and fresh dead in the most unlikely and absurd places. On the 6th August their turn ended, and they came back, for a couple of days, to the 2nd Guards Brigade in the Bois du Warnimont hutments—none too good—outside Authie. Here His Majesty the King visited them on the 9th August, and, after three “quiet” days spent in reconnoitring the trenches in front of Mailly-Maillet and Auchonvillers, the Battalion on the 13th relieved the 1st Coldstream in the front line. It was a featureless turn of duty, barring some minenwerfer work by the enemy once or twice in the dawns, which affected nothing. They were relieved by a battalion of the K.O.Y.L.I. on the 15th, and hutted in the wood near Mailly-Maillet. Here began their more specialised training for the work that lay ahead of them. It included everything that modern warfare of that date could imagine, from following up drum-barrages at twenty-five yards’ distance, to the unlovely business of unloading ammunition at railheads.