ming tea and sizzling fried eggs and bacon cooked to the
minute. Nothing like being out all night for galvanising the breakfast
appetite. And no time for lingering afterwards. A canter along the
roadside to catch up the telephone cart; then, while the
signalling-sergeant, a good fellow who could read a map, reeled out
lines through the wood to the batteries, I undertook a tussle with the
terminal boards in the huge and elaborate dug-out telephone exchange,
that up to 5 A.M. had been the chief exchange of the whole Division.
Now that Divisional Headquarters had been established where Corps
Headquarters had been the day before, four miles back, there had to be
a re-allotment of lines to Infantry, Artillery, Engineers, A.S.C., and
the other units that work out the will of the Divisional Commander.

"I'll get young Bushman down from B Battery to do signalling-officer
to-morrow. It will be difficult for you to do adjutant and
signalling-officer as well," remarked the colonel two hours later, as
he bent over his maps.

3 P.M.: A R.H.A. brigade had put in a claim for the quarters destined
for us. Three days ago this would have resulted in polite recrimination
and telephoned appeals to higher authorities, but to-day, such is the
effect of mobile warfare, we all managed to dig in somehow. A decent
hut for the colonel had been found, and there was a room in a
bomb-mauled cottage, where the doctor, "Swiffy," the veterinary
officer, and myself hoped to spread our camp-beds. We had shaved and
washed and lunched, and looked and felt respectable again. The C.R.A.
and the brigade-major had called and gone off with the colonel to see
the batteries shoot. I had forwarded by despatch-rider the Brigade
return of casualties to the staff captain, so that reinforcements might
be applied for forthwith. A French pointer of confiding disposition,
who came into the mess from nowhere in particular, seemed quite to have
made up his mind that we were come to stay.

The telephone bell! The brigade-major of our companion Infantry
Brigade, with the latest news! "He's not crossed the canal on our front
yet, and your guns are doing good work keeping him back. But he's got
farther forward than we expected north of us. It's from the south that
we want more news. There's a report that we have been pushed out of
Tergnier. That's very bad, if true."

A quarter of an hour later he rang up again. "There's a report that
enemy infantry are massing in Z 23 d 5