“I should not be surprised,” I told him, and went below to superintend the packing of my kit. It was no easy matter. Things accumulate in the line; I always went up the line with a modestly filled pack, but by the time I came down, it needed a mailbag to hold the books and magazines that had gradually gathered round me, and after a fortnight in the same dugout my kit was in no condition for emergency transportation. My batman was examining it with a sorrowful face. “You’ll ’ave to dump most of these books, Sir.” “Oh, but surely we can get some of them down?” “Then you’ll have to dump those boots, Sir, and that blanket. Can’t take the lot, Sir.” It was no use to argue with him. The batman’s orders are far more law than a mandate from Brigade. The Brigadier is merely content to issue orders; batmen see that theirs are carried out. There was nothing for it but to dump the books, and I looked sadly at the considerable collection that the mails of the last fourteen days had brought. “Have they all got to go?” “‘Fraid so, Sir.” “What, all my pretty chickens, at one fell swoop?” Private Warren eyed me stolidly. “Well, Sir, I might manage two, Sir, but no more.” I ran a pathetic eye over them. There were several I particularly wanted to save; there were two novels by Hardy, Robert Graves’s new book of Poems, _Regiment of Women_, a battered copy of _La Terre_, _The Oxford Book of Verse_, _The Stucco House_. After a moment’s hesitation, the last two were saved for further odysseys; there was just room in a spare pocket for _Fairies and Fusiliers_; the rest would have to stay to welcome the Teuton. At last all the equipment of a machine-gun section had been carted away. I took one turn round the dugouts to see that no incriminating document remained. The dugout looked hospitably clean; all the delicacies of handing over had been observed, but as there would be up one to receive the relieving party, manners demanded some sort of “Salve”; and so, tearing from a notebook a sheet of paper, I scrawled across it in large letters, CHEERIOH, and pinned it over the entrance of my deserted home. § 2 _March 28th, 1918._ Of course the limbers never turned up. For two months without the least inconvenience from German artillery they had come up to the ration dump every night, but on this particular night they felt sure it would arouse suspicions, and so a guide was sent instead. And in France there are only two sorts of guides. There is the guide who does not know the way and owns up to it, and there is the guide who does not know the way and pretends he does. There are no others. Luckily ours came under the former category. “You see, Sir, I’ve only bin from Headquarters once and that was by day, and I’m not too sure of the way.... I’ve only been ’ere once and that....”