But the chief blessing of being in support lay in the fact that we were not directly responsible for giving the first alarm. The onus of waiting and watching for the German attack lay on the Westshires, and our men felt themselves to be more or less onlookers for the day, and lay about reading the newspapers and smoking. Evans and I found plenty to occupy ourselves during the afternoon. There was a small farm just by the side of our trench, protected from view by a row of cottages. The owners of the farm had gone the day before, when there had been an attack on the village, and left their home just as it was. We took over the farm for our own use, got a fire going in the kitchen, and set our servants to work to prepare dinner. Jenkins, my servant, had been a chauffeur valet before the war, and had great ideas how things ought to be done. These ideas had on occasion been reduced to making tea during a halt by the roadside in a small black and dirty pot, which he kept fastened to his pack, but with a kitchen stove to cook over and an unlimited supply of crockery he was in his element. Having annexed the farm as an officers' mess and installed Jenkins in the kitchen we made a tour of the yard. Here we found several things which wanted doing. First there was the farm dog, who had been left behind chained to his kennel. The dog had had nothing to eat for two days, and was ravenous. We got him a large bone and loosed him, so that if we had to scurry he would not have to stay behind. Then we found some cows in a shed in great pain from want of milking. There was a man in my platoon who had been a dairyman, and I set him to work on them. In a barn we found a quantity of straw, which we sent down to the trenches. Finally we got soap and towels from a bedroom, and repaired to the pump for a much-needed cleaning. After washing ourselves we went out for a stroll before dinner. We found a little group standing in the lee of the cottage across the road--the Adjutant of the Westshires, the regimental doctor, two stretcher-bearers, and an N.C.O. A man had been hit in the trench just ahead of us, and the doctor had been sent for to come up from the field-ambulance. The doctor had just sent word up to the trench to find out the nature of the man's injuries. If he was severely wounded and required immediate attention, the doctor was prepared to send up his stretcher-bearers to have him brought down, but it would be a difficult job and exposing men's lives, and the doctor wanted, if possible, to leave the man there till dark. Doctors attached to regiments have many difficult points to settle, and occasions like this often arise when it is hard for them to decide whether to risk more lives to save one. They are called upon sometimes to go up and attend to cases in all sorts of impossible places, and in the firing-line the old cry of "Send for the doctor" is not quite so easily answered as in other places.