One day I picked up a thread which conducted me straight back to Waterloo. It was in an old château I found it, an exquisitely preserved gem of the early seventeenth century, with a pigeon-coop, emblematic of seigneurial rights, and a dainty little flower-garden, a perfect corner of old France which, as a contemporaneous print hung in one of the rooms of the château attested, had not changed its appearance since it was laid out when the château was built. In this château Grant’s Brigade of cavalry, which fought at Waterloo, was quartered for two years after the battle. The place was still redolent of the memories of the British cavalry which, as part of the army of occupation of the Allies after the overthrow of Napoleon, had been quartered in the château and in the little township which surrounds it. In the outer wall of the stables they showed me a row of rings affixed there for the horses, a hundred years ago, by the men of the 15th Hussars who were in Grant’s Brigade. In and about the little town surrounding the château, on the occasion of my visit, I met again men of the 15th Hussars quartered there--the 15th Hussars of to-day, gallantly carrying on the great traditions which their forbears at Waterloo helped to establish. These ancient châteaux in our zone of operations often change their occupants. A Staff moves on and disappears, and before the old house has had time to relapse into its secular sleep there is another irruption of “brass-hats” in motor-cars and mess orderlies in motor-lorries. The General Staff room is generally established in the largest room of the château. I have seen some curious contrasts in these rooms. I have in mind a long and lofty apartment with a broad alcove made by a story of one of the corner turrets of the château. On the walls old-fashioned oil-paintings hung side by side with innumerable maps, army orders, and various indications, serious and facetious. A Staff Officer was sitting at a big old oak table spread with an extraordinary collection of mud-stained papers. This was the Intelligence Officer going through correspondence found on German prisoners and dead. In the alcove another Staff Officer was talking on the telephone to a Brigade Headquarters; sandbags was the theme, and its discussion developed a certain amount of acerbity as it proceeded. A young man in very muddy riding-boots stood by the handsome carved-stone mantelpiece, his cap on the back of his head, a riding-crop in his hand. He was waiting with some impatience for the sandbag debate to finish.