But the easy time did not endure.

The first of July, nineteen hundred and sixteen, which turned the British front opposite Albert from a picnic-ground to a cemetery, reacted promptly on the hitherto quiescent valleys below Messines. The words “maximum activity,” scribbled by a thousand telephonists, thumped on a thousand typewriters, stripped tarpaulin from the 12-inch naval gun on the railway by the cross-roads, unroofed its sister in the canvas house opposite Divisional Baths, woke howitzer and eighteen-pounder in their pits beneath the trees, mortar and machine-gun in their hiding-places among the trenches. To these, the Boche replied with his eight-inch at Oostaverne, his 77’s behind the ridge, and a peculiarly deadly Minenwerfer which ran on rails and changed position whenever fired at.

Gone were the unstrenuous days, the scarcely disturbed nights. Conway’s “poker-school” vanished like a raided gambling-house.

For a week, “demonstrations” continued; and on the eighth night, a handful of infantry, faces blackened, dirks at their belts, revolvers in hand, slipped over their parapet under cover of the shrapnel-barrage, crawled along the Steenbeek, dropped down into the nine-foot duck-boarded trenches of “Bon Fermier”... and returned, dirks bloody, revolvers reeking, with the four dazed and cowered prisoners—(four they were asked to bring and four only they brought)—which Brigade orders had demanded....

Came rumours of the battle, “down south”: it went well, it went badly, we made progress, we did not make enough progress. Followed amazing manoeuvres: Australian gunners, six-foot men who handled their leaping pieces like toys, arrived to “take over” from the Southdowns: “Beer” Battery moved back to a farm behind Bailleul, were ordered to dig gun-pits along the Stuiverbeek, laboured three days hauling beams and sand, were ordered back into action, “took over” from the Australians (who were “going to the Somme, by cripes”), were relieved by wrathy Ulstermen who cursed a place called Beaumont Hamel ... and marched quietly westwards through Bailleul and Meteren and Fletre and Caestre to their old rest area in the farms about Eecke!

“I’m g-getting a bit fed-up with this,” stuttered Straker, “where the d-devil are we going to?”

“Oh, we’re going to the Somme all right, don’t you worry about that,” said Peter, wise in Staff mysteries. “This is just a preliminary canter.”