When we had limped into the field in which we are at present bivouacked, we found that only two teams could be watered at one time at the ford. This meant that grooming had to be prolonged until the last horse in the battery had been watered. By the time stables had been dismissed, the men were so tired that they did not care for breakfast, but tumbled off to sleep where they dropped. Today I am orderly-dog, on duty for twenty-four hours from reveille to reveille. I sit here among the bales of hay which have been thrown down from the G. S. wagons, and I watch—and I marvel, as I never cease to marvel, at the men’s indomitable pluck. Now that they know what lies ahead of them, their behaviour is completely nonchalant and ordinary. They have accepted the idea of catastrophe and have dismissed it from their minds. If they refer to it at all, it is merely as material out of which to manufacture jokes against themselves. Last night’s march, with its cold and wet, being over is forgotten. More night-marches lie before them which may be worse than the last, but they cross no bridges until they come to them. For the moment the sun shines luxuriously and their fatigue is gone. Some of them are practising pitching with a base-ball; others are washing and cooling their swollen feet in the ford. The gramophone, which we always carry with us, is playing popular selections from the latest thing in musical comedy. It’s a point of honour with every officer in our mess when he goes on leave to bring back at least half-a-dozen new records. The tunes bring pleasant memories of girls and taxis and dinner-parties and dances, of crowded theatres jammed with cheering khaki, of uproarious laughter, of sirens blowing and bombs falling on London house-tops—the memories still are pleasant—and of late adventurous home-comings along unlighted thoroughfares to sheeted beds. All of which memories are in rosy contrast to the stern laboriousness of our present. Afar off I can see Bully Beef, toddling on chubby legs along the edge of the wood gathering wild-flowers. That slim young soldier, who follows him with her eyes between intervals of mending a tunic, must be Suzette. The scene is extraordinarily restful. We might be planning to live forever. Wherever the eye rests the prevailing note is sanity and calm. And yet our calmness is only an outward pretence; it means nothing more than this, that we are in hiding from the spies of the enemy. The woods which surround us were selected that no one might know that Foch’s Pets are on the march. A further emphasis was laid on the magnitude of the ordeal which awaits us by an order regarding men under arrest, which we received this morning; they are to be released and the charges against them dropped, that they may be available for cannon-fodder. This is no act of mercy; it simply means that every last man will be needed for the replacing of casualties.