We were ordered to relieve the ----'s at midnight on the fourth day, and once again we braced ourselves for the last desperate battle of our lives. All soldiers go through this process during their first weeks of active service every time they 'move' anywhere. Immense expectations, vows, fears, prayers, fill their minds; and nothing particular happens. Only the really experienced soldier knows that it is the exception and not the rule for anything particular to happen; and the heroes of romance and history who do not move a muscle when told that they are to attack at dawn are generally quite undeserving of praise, since long experience has taught them that the attack is many times more likely to be cancelled than to occur. Until it actually does happen they will not believe in it; they make all proper preparations, but quite rightly do not move a muscle. We, however, were now to have our first illustration of this great military truth. For, indeed, we were to have no battle. Yet that night's march to the trenches was an experience that made full compensation. It was already dusk when we moved out of the rest-camp, and the moon was not up. As usual in new units, the leading platoons went off at a reckless canter, and stumbling after them in the gathering shadows over rocky, precipitous slopes, and in and out of the clumps of bush, falling in dark holes on to indignant sleepers, or maddeningly entangled in hidden strands of wire, the rear companies were speedily out of touch. To a heavily laden infantryman there are few things more exasperating than a night march into the line conducted too fast. If the country be broken and strewn with obstacles, at which each man must wait while another climbs or drops or wrestles or wades in front of him, and must then laboriously scamper after him in the shadows lest he, and thereby all those behind him, be lost; if the country be unknown to him, so that, apart from purely military considerations, the fear of being lost is no small thing, for a man knows that he may wander all night alone in the dark, surrounded by unknown dangers, cut off from sleep, and rations, and the friendly voices of companions, a jest among them when he discovers them: then such a march becomes a nightmare.