At midnight the last men quitted our front trenches, and, going “as they pleased,” made off through the pouring rain to rejoin their comrades. A private in the 2nd Cheshires got left behind. He remained at his post at the parapet with a waterproof sheet over his shoulders, firing at intervals at the German parapet opposite him. Presently he noticed that the trench had grown very still. He left his post and went round the adjacent traverse. Nobody there! He went round the traverse on his other side. Again a vista of empty trench! He hurried down the trenches for a hundred yards or so, and found that everyone had gone. He was, as he put it afterwards, “left to face the whole blooming German Army alone.” He lost no time in joining the retirement. Many of the wounded of the days of heavy fighting had been taken to the ruined villages of Frezemberg and Zonnebeke, where the doctors tended them by candlelight in the cellars. During the evening, in anticipation of the withdrawal, by hook and by crook, seventy-six motor ambulances were got together. From dusk until half an hour after midnight, it had been found impossible to remove a single wounded man, as each would have had to be carried by hand over marshy ground through inky darkness, and without lights, for no lights could be shown. The Germans were shelling both villages heavily, and I should like to pay a tribute here to the splendid courage of the motor-ambulance drivers who sat imperturbably at the steering-wheel of their cars in the open street and waited for the wounded, with shells falling fast about them. The evacuation of the wounded at Zonnebeke was the work of Colonel Ferguson, R.A.M.C., and of Major Waggett, R.A.M.C., the throat specialist of Harley Street. Thanks to the untiring devotion of these two officers, every wounded man was safely got away, with the exception of a few men with shattered limbs whom it would have been dangerous to move, and who were left behind with comforts and medicines, and two R.A.M.C. orderlies to tend them. Every man of the R.A.M.C., doctors and orderlies alike, worked like Trojans that night, and added fresh laurels to the rich harvest which the corps has gleaned already in this war. On our right centre, where the men had stood for days a very heavy bombardment, the troops were very loth to fall back. Some of the men left insulting messages addressed to the “Germs,” as they call them, pinned on to the trenches. One man was seen going round “tidying up” his section of trench, “just to leave things clean for the Germs,” as he naïvely explained!