weather. The officers and N.C.O.'s were exercised freely at map-reading (which on the Somme required high powers of imagination), sketching reports and compass-work and occasionally officers and N.C.O.'s made up a platoon and worked out small tactical exercises—such as the rush-in and downing of a suddenly raised machine-gun after a barrage had lifted. The men were kept to the needs of railway and transport, but it was an easy life in warm, grassy Etricourt after months of mud and torn dirt. A swimming bath was dug for them; there were wild flowers to be gathered, and an orchard in blossom to show that the world still lived naturally, and their work was close to their parade-grounds. Men spoke affectionately of Etricourt where shell-holes were so few that they could count them.
A home-draft had brought the Battalion six pipers who on the 4th of May "played at Retreat for the first time," and thereafter followed the Battalion's fortunes. As everybody knows, Irish pipes have one drone less than the Scottish, but it is not commonly understood that the piper in his close-fitting saffron kilt plays them almost without any movement of the body—a point of difference that has puzzled very many Scots regiments. That immobility, as the Pipe Major observed on an historic occasion, is "one of the secrets of the regiment."
On the 20th of May they marched—not without some discomfort from an artillery brigade which was trying to use the same road at the same time—from Etricourt to Curlu on the Somme, where they were once more billeted in houses. Here, after so many weeks of making their own camps to their own minds, they were introduced to other people's housekeeping, and found the whole village "left in a filthy condition by previous troops." So they cleaned it up and trained and learned from the Divisional Gas Officer of Transport how gas-helmets should be adjusted on horses—to which some of the scared beasts hotly objected; and they bathed by companies in the warm Somme, making
