the wood close by, and he told me that his Division had
been reduced to barely 3000 men and a very few officers, after an
appalling amount of severe fighting.

Weatherby came back after a time, and the battalions and ourselves
moved off along the road and branched off into the grounds of
Herenthage Chateau--deep mud, broken trees, and hardly rideable. Here
we bade adieu to our horses, who were, with the transport, to stay in
the same place where we had had our dinners, right the other side of
Ypres and out of shell-range, whilst we kept a few ammunition-carts
and horses hidden near Hooge village. All the rest of our supplies and
stuff had to be brought up every night under cover of darkness to near
Herenthage, and there be unloaded and carried by hand into the
trenches.

In the chateau itself who should we come across but Drysdale,[16]
Brigade-Major now of the 22nd Brigade, the one which, by the law of
chances, we were now relieving; and, still more oddly, the other
battalion (2nd) of the Bedfords was in his Brigade. It was a cheerless
place, this chateau--every single pane of glass in it shivered, and
lying, crunched at our every step, on the floor.

[Footnote 16: My late Brigade-Major at Belfast, now, alas!
killed (on the Somme, 1916).]

We pushed on over the grass of the park, through the scattered trees,
and into the wood, and so into the trenches. Even then, as far as one
could judge in the darkness, the ground was a regular rabbit-warren.
By the time we had finished with the district the ground was even more
so; there seemed to be more trenches and fallen trees and wire
entanglements than there was level ground to walk on.

Our own Headquarters were in a poky little dug-out[17] in a wood, not
200 yards from our firing trenches. There was just room for
two--Weatherby and St Andre (Moulton-Barrett having gone to settle
about transport and supplies, Cadell being away sick, and Beilby being
left with the transport the other side of Ypres)--to lie down in it,
and there was a little tunnel out of it, 6 feet long and 2 broad and
2 high, into which I crept and where I slept; but I was not very happy
in it, as the roof-logs had sagged with the weight of the earth on
them, and threatened every moment to fall in whilst I was inside.

[Footnote 17: Really only a half roofed-in little trench,
marked H on the map.]

[Illustration: Beukenhorst (near Ypres).]

The Bedfords were put i