It is morning of February 22, 1917. Colonel Bellamy and his four company commanders are setting out to reconnoitre the new front line. Guides are to meet us at Deniecourt Chateau, a heap of chalk slabs and old bricks, beneath which are Brigade Headquarters. To reach this _rendez-vous_ we pass through Foucaucourt and then along a corduroy road through Deniecourt Wood to the village of that name. The wood has been fought through and but few branches remain on the trees, whose trunks, like so many untidy telegraph poles, rise to various heights from the upheaval of shell-holes and undergrowth. Dismal surroundings on a dismal morning, for the frost has relented for several days and already sides of trenches are collapsing (flop go the chunks into the water!) and on top the ground is loading one's boots at every step. We change into gumboots in an old cellar and our journey commences. See the Colonel, Cuthbert, Marcon, Brown, Stockton, Robinson and myself lead off down a communication trench behind a guide, pledged to take us to the Berks Headquarters. The going is desperate--water up to our knees; however, each hundred yards brings our goal nearer, and it can hardly be like this all the way. We come to a trench junction, and our guide turns left-handed; presently another--the guide knows the way and again turns to the left. Confound the mud! If we do not get there soon we shall never be home for lunch ... but we do not get there soon. The guide, always protesting that he knows the way, has led us in a circle and here we are whence we started an hour ago! After such well-meaning mockery of our efforts, a route 'over the top' is tried. Soon we are outside Battalion Headquarters of the Berks. Whilst we are there, German gas shelling starts--a few rounds of phosgene--and helmets require to be adjusted. It is not everybody's helmet that fits, this being the first real occasion on which some officers have worn them. There is some laughing to see the strictest censor of a gas helmet (or its absence) in difficulties with his own, when the moment for its adjustment has arrived. The company commanders duly separate to go up to their own sections of the front. They see the 'posts,' or any of them that can be visited in daylight, make notes of local details affecting the relief, and so home independently. Billets never seemed so comfortable or attractive as on the night preceding a relief. Perhaps they would have seemed more so had the Battalion known, what luckily it could not, that an unpleasant tour was in store, and that afterwards, with the enemy in retreat, there would be no more billets until the summer. CHAPTER V. IN THE ABLAINCOURT SECTOR, FEBRUARY, 1917. German retreat foreshadowed.--The Battalion takes over the Ablaincourt Sector.--Issues in the making.--Lieutenant Fry mortally wounded.--The raid by German storm-troops on February 28. --The raid explained.