It was a jolly meal. Five of the officers were there, beside the Colonel, including the machine-gun officer (formerly the Regimental Quartermaster-Sergeant), who had just got his commission. Three months later I lunched with the Colonel again. He had by that time become a Brigadier. Of all that merry luncheon-party, only he and the machine-gun officer (now a Captain with the Military Cross, and promoted Brigade Machine-Gun Officer) survived. The other three were dead, killed within a few hours of one another on the Fromelles ridge. The survivors at luncheon that day spoke of them with infinite affection, with obvious regret, but without any lamentation. Death has another aspect out here. It is often the matter of a fraction of an inch. One friend is taken and the other left. And the survivor “carries on,” only in his heart wondering “Why he and not I?” Our men make longer stays in the billets situated farther away from the front than in those which are merely the jumping-off place for the trenches. Some of the cavalry spent months on end in the same billets, cursing this horseless war and chafing at their inaction. From time to time they took their turn in the trenches, and played their part manfully, as at Ypres on May 13, when the flower of the cavalry suffered cruel losses from a terrible German bombardment. But for the most part they carried on what was practically peace training in conditions which were depressing and monotonous to the last degree. Thus I fell in with a crack Hussar regiment billeted in some farms well off the main road. Their billets were so remote that it took me a good hour to locate them. After inquiring successively from two privates in an _estaminet_, a farrier-sergeant playing ball with a small girl in a courtyard, and a battered-looking young subaltern riding down the road, a long, low farm-house with a red-tiled roof, built round three sides of a yard in which a duck-pond, a dung-heap, and several enormous pigs were the outstanding features, was pointed out to me as the officers’ quarters. I side-stepped the dung-heap, skirted the pond, and, dodging the pigs, banged on the door with my riding-crop. “_Entrez!_” shouted someone within, and I entered the mess of the 3rd Hussars. “Mess” summed up the scene rather well. Of the four or five officers in the room, most were lying, the picture of boredom, on sleeping valises which lined the walls of the long, low-pitched room. A table on trestles in the centre was piled up with maps, field-glasses, cigarette-tins, magazines, a mass of Sam Browne belts, a Sparklet bottle, a tin of shortbread, and some flowers in a shell-case. The stone floor was thick with mud, brought in fresh that morning, as the boots of the officers present certified.