The billets, of course, varied greatly, some being very good indeed--one where the officers of the Regiment or squadron were actually provided with beds and “linen sheets,”--others very dirty and bad. Lieutenant Chrystall writes on the 19th of May: “It is very wet and muddy, and we are at present in a coal-mining village, and everything as you may imagine filthy. Last night I slept next my skipper on the road with my head between two spokes of a cart-wheel, and Eve’s between the next. Cobbles are not very springy or soft!” _Captain W. H. Eve--May 27._--“You say you are watching for news of the Cavalry. Well, you have it now in the Casualties List. That is the British Cavalry. It is, I think, wicked, for they are men we can’t replace, but the fact is they can’t trust any but the very best up there at Ypres, and that’s why they sent for the Cavalry. They get their chance and are used, but we, poor devils! ... never get a chance.... Our turn will come some day.[11] Up there we are holding on and shall do so, but it costs good men. We sit back here well within sound of the guns, and go on with more or less peace-training and try to be patient. Whenever there is a big show on, off we go up behind the line, and every time we think our time has really come; but every time we come back again in a few days--a sort of mobile reserve, that’s all. We are known out here as the ‘Iron Ration,’ only to be used in the last emergency! We went up like this during Neuve Chapelle into Belgium during the fighting round Ypres, and the other day near La Bassée. We are back here again, now very comfortable in a pretty straggling village.... We are all very fit and flourishing, but rather fed up with our own share of the proceedings.” Sometimes the Regiment, or part of it, got a change of work. _Lieutenant Watson Smyth--May 28._--“The day before yesterday the bathing season started and we had (the squadron and officers) gone into the baths at Aire.... We were all just nicely in the water, which wasn’t very cold, when a heated bicycle orderly dashed up and said, ‘“B” Squadron to return to billets at once.’ We couldn’t think what it was for.... Yesterday (after a twenty-mile night march) I went for my orders and discovered that I am ‘Corps Cavalry,’ and that my duties are to send patrols out in the Corps area to look out for spies, collect stragglers, control the traffic at various points, and, in general, be a sort of mounted police. It is, I believe, an excellent job, and quite good fun. Of course the roads are being shelled now and then, but the people I relieved had only one casualty, and he was gas-poisoned by a shell. In case of a push I have to find posts at cross-roads, &c., to direct ammunition and supplies to the various places that they want to go to. It is very nice being on one’s own, as I am now. The Squadron Headquarters are about six miles off, so I shan’t be worried by any one.” [Illustration: HURDLE SHELTERS, BOIS DU REVEILLON. 15TH MARCH 1915.]