in drawing their stores. It is a temptation, when in the
midst of all these thousands of articles, to seize the opportunity,
when no one is looking, to pocket a few extra spares and dainty little
tools, not, of course, for one's own personal benefit, but simply
because such things are always being lost or stolen, and it is
exasperating, to say the least, to find one's self, at a critical
moment, without some article which it is impossible to duplicate at
the time.

During these last few days it was a continual march for the men from
B---- to E----. Very often they were called back when their day's work
was over to draw some new article or make some alteration which had
been forgotten at the time they were in the workshops.

At last, however,--on the third day following the grand concert,--the
kits were packed, loaded on to the lorries, and sent off to E----. The
troops said "Good-bye" to the village which had been such a happy home
and school during that winter of 1916, and the officers made their
fond adieus to the mothers and daughters of the houses in which they
had been billeted.

The companies formed up and marched along to the workshops. Every one
was in high spirits, and there was a friendly race to see which
Company of the Battalion could load up their tanks in the shortest
time on to the specially constructed steel trucks.

A few days before all these activities commenced, Talbot and another
Tank Commander had gone on to the tanks' ultimate destination, A----,
a village which had been evacuated a few days before by the Germans on
their now famous retirement to the Hindenburg Line. It was a most
extraordinary sight to ride along the road from Albert to Bapaume,
which during the summer and winter of the preceding year had witnessed
such heavy fighting. The whole country on each side of the road was a
desolate vista of shell-holes as far as the eye could see. Where
villages had been, there was now no trace left of any sort of
habitation. One might think that, however heavy a bombardment, some
trace would be left of the village which had suffered. There was
literally nothing left of the village through which had run the road
they were now travelling. Over this scarred stretch of country were
dotted camps and groups of huts, with duck-boards crossing the old
shell-holes, some of which were still full of water.

On approaching B---- they saw traces everywhere of the methodical and
organized methods by which the