The 16th September was an almost continuous bombardment of whizz-bangs and 5.9’s on the trench where they still lay; but in the intervals of the shelling men kept turning up and reporting themselves with tales of adventure and extremity among the shell-holes outside. They were relieved a little before midnight and left their battered lair eighty-eight strong, _via_ Ginchy, Guillemont, and Trônes Wood for the Citadel, which, when they reached their total, had been increased by strays to one hundred and six. Lieutenant Bainbridge, eminently capable of looking after himself and his party, turned up later with another sixty. Next day, the weary work of re-making the Battalion began. Lieutenant Dollar had to be sent down to hospital with a return of the dysentery from which he had reported himself recovered. This further reduced the few available officers on their feet. A draft of a hundred and fifty men came in. By absorbing the still effective digging-platoon into the active line, a battalion of four companies of a hundred each was put together and turned out for the next week in the Carnoy mud to drill under new company commanders. MUD-FIGHTING ON THE SOMME The second move of the Guards Division opened on the 25th September, and this time the ball was with the 1st Battalion. The work on the 15th of the month had carried the Fourteenth Division’s front on to the naked ridge towards Morval and Lesbœufs where it had been held, but without advance, for the past ten days. Now brigade orders came “to renew the attacks” over what remained untaken of the ground. “The Guards Division will capture Lesbœufs. The 1st Guards Brigade will attack on the right, the 3rd on the left,” while the Fifth Division was to attack Morval on the right of the Guards Division and the Twenty-First Division (62nd Brigade) would take Gueudecourt on the left. The 2nd Guards Brigade would be in reserve; and the Battalion hoped, as men may who know what war means, that they would not be needed. Nor were they till the evening of the 26th September, when they moved from Trônes Wood and its dead, to relieve the 1st Battalion, used and broken for the second time in ten days, the day before, with the 2nd Grenadiers who “after the attack on Lesbœufs had dug themselves in to the east of that town.” Cæsar himself does not equal the sublime terseness of the Diary. All their world from the King downwards was to crown them with praise later on, but in the meantime reliefs must be orderly conducted and touch must be kept through the shell-tormented darkness with the battalions on either side, while they themselves settled in the reeking front line under certainty of vicious bombardment and the possibility of suddenly launched counter-attack. They were shelled all that night from their relief on and throughout the next day (the 27th) “by every type of shell, but mostly by 5.9’s.” In the afternoon when it became necessary to help an attack on their left by launching a creeping