I made the tour of the farm with the doctor of the Dorchesters, who was thinking of taking it over as a hospital himself. When we came down from the roof we found two farm girls outside. They asked us anxiously if it would be safe for them to stay there that night, and we assured them it would. They said they had gone off a mile or two for two or three days, but now they had come back to look after the cows. They were a pair of very cool young ladies, who seemed to regard the German occupation of their farm as no more than a heavy rainstorm, to be avoided while it lasted, but not to be worried about once it was over. The doctor and I went round to look at the cowsheds. The beasts were all in their stalls, some evidently suffering a good deal from want of milking. In the first shed we came to there was a most appalling stench. The doctor sniffed and said he thought it was something dead. We examined the cows that were lying down, but they were all alive. Then the doctor made an orderly rake over all the straw. He said that the Germans had a habit of hiding dead men under straw, if they were vacating a place, just by way of providing a pleasant surprise for any tired British soldiers who might make the straw their bed. However, there were no corpses in the cowshed, and we never discovered the cause of the smell, though it was strong and nasty enough to prevent my ever forgetting it. On coming out of the farm I found the Dorchester Regiment passing by. After lying about in a trench, hardly seeing more than the men in one's own platoon, it was quite a change to see another regiment and have a talk to the officers about their experiences in the past few days. It was interesting to hear how the next-door regiment had fared in the night attack, and if they had met much opposition in gaining the village they had been told to take. One subaltern, with a scrubby ten days' growth of beard on his chin, grinned as though he thought he knew me as he went by, and said: "Who'd have thought we were being brought up to do this?" I looked at him, and suddenly recognized a fellow who had been a cadet with me at Sandhurst. It did, indeed, seem droll to look back on the days when we had drilled in the same squad together and studied tactics in the same class, without ever, I am afraid, any serious thoughts of war. Well, anyway, now our learning was being put to the test, and as I watched the boy now become a man march by with his company, all muddy from the trenches, with his few worldly possessions slung from his belt, I thought that he, at any rate, was a good advertisement for Sandhurst. "Where are you going--do you know?" I called.