'close and accurate artillery support.'

'NOTHING TO REPORT'

'_On the Western Front there is nothing to report. All remains
quiet._'--OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

The 7th (Territorial) King's Own Asterisks had 'taken over' their
allotted portion of the trenches and were settling themselves in for
the night. When the two facts are taken in conjunction that it was an
extremely unpleasant night, cold, wet and bleak, and the 7th were
thoroughly happy and would not have exchanged places with any other
battalion in Flanders, it will be very plain to those who know their
Front that the 7th K.O.A. were exceedingly new to the game. They were:
and actually this was their first spell of duty in the forward firing
trenches.

They had been out for some weeks, weary weeks, filled with the digging
of communication trenches well behind the firing trenches, with drills
and with various 'fatigues' of what they considered a navvying rather
than a military nature. But every task piled upon their reluctant
shoulders had been performed promptly and efficiently, and now at last
they were enjoying the reward of their zeal--a turn in the forward
trenches.

The men were unfeignedly pleased with themselves, with the British
Army, and with the whole world. The non-coms, were anxious and
desperately keen to see everything in apple-pie order. The Company
officers were inclined to be fidgety, and the O.C. was worried and
concerned to the verge of nerves. He pored over the trench maps that
had been handed to him, he imagined assaults delivered on this point
and that, hurried, at the point of the pencil, his supports along
various blue and red lines to the threatened angles of the wriggly line
that represented the forward trench, drew lines from his machine-gun
emplacements to the red-inked crosses of the German wire entanglements,
frowned and cogitated over the pencil crosses placed by the O.C. of the
relieved battalion where the lurking-places of German maxims were
suspected. Afterwards he made a long and exhaustive tour of the muddy
trenches, concealing his anxiety from the junior officers, and speaking
lightly and cheerfully to them--following therein truly and
instinctively the first principle of all good commanders to show the
greater confidence as they feel it the less. He returned to the
Battalion Headquarters, situated in a very grimy cellar of a
shell-wrecked house behind the support trenches, and partook of a
belated dinner o