On the night of May 15th and morning of May 16th, General Hubert Gough's 7th Infantry Division made a splendid "push" to La Quinque Rue, in front of Festubert, the report of which made cheery reading. The men of the 1st Cavalry Division were housed in "huts" near Vlamertinghe. On the 16th General de Lisle addressed the contingents, one after another. He asked me to verify one or two details that had been reported, and this work gave me a most pleasant couple of hours chatting about the battle of May 13th with men of half a dozen of the different regiments that took part in it. The evening of the 17th found the 1st Cavalry Division, after seventy-two hours' rest, again marching through Ypres to take a further turn in the trenches. [Illustration: Hussars' cook-house, Vlamertinghe huts, Vlamertinghe] [Illustration: Group of Cavalry officers at the huts at Vlamertinghe] The Salient had been comparatively quiet since the last German onslaught on the 13th, but howitzer shells were daily falling over the lines with tiresome regularity. I was sent by General de Lisle to a house near Ypres, where we had planned to have a "basket dinner" before leaving for night quarters on the Menin Road. A very young staff-officer, instructed to guide me, misunderstood that such duty was required of him, and went off about some business of his own before I had been able to learn the location of the house. Meeting "Rattle" Barrett, I asked him if he could give me the desired information. "I don't know about the dinner part of it," said "Rattle"; but your headquarters for the night are well east of Ypres, on the Menin Road. Go to the house nearest the château that stands by the Halte, where the railway crosses the road, and you can't miss it if you try. The General had disappeared on foot, the juvenile staff-officer was nowhere to be found, so off I went, in accordance with Barrett's instructions. Darkness was coming on. I passed along lines of 2nd Cavalry Brigade troopers, marching toward Ypres and through it. No lights were allowed, though my car was secure from liability of offence in that particular, for the electric installation had gone wrong, a not infrequent occurrence, and no one but a master electrician could coax a glimmer out of the headlamps. Bump! Bump! I jolted from hole to hole in the smashed roadway. The streets were crowded with the machinery of the divisional relief in full swing. Ypres seemed more smashed, if possible, than when we had last passed through six days before. From the Grande Place down the Rue de Menin, to the bridge and Menin Road beyond, and well out past the fork, where the roads branched to Zonnebeke and Menin respectively, the path was narrow and tortuous. Piled high on either hand were heaps of _débris_, alternated with chasms, some sufficiently deep so that a fall to the bottom would put a car promptly _hors de combat_. An unpleasant smell of burning flesh came from the smouldering mounds lining the way.