- ber, joined on the 24th October. (The average expectation
of an officer's life in those days on the Somme was still about six weeks, though some were so lucky they survived for months.) Four officers had been wounded in the same period: Lieutenants G. K. Thompson, Lieutenant (Acting Captain) Joyce; G. E. F. Van der Noot, and 2nd Lieutenant P. M. Riley, all on the 30th November. The following officers joined in November and December: Lieutenants Zigomala, B. F. Crewdson, D. J. B. FitzGerald and J. N. Ward; and 2nd Lieutenants H. A. A. Collett, A. W. G. Jamrack and C. A. J. Nicholson.
At Beaumetz-les-Loges they lay till the end of the year, cleaning up, refitting, drilling, and not forgetting their football—the 2nd Scots Guards beat them in the third round of the Divisional Football Competition at Arras—or their company Christmas dinners. These were the fourth that the Battalion had eaten within sound of the weary guns, but if any one had told them that their next would be celebrated in stately steam-heated barracks at Cologne, hospital would have been his portion. They could not have been called happy or hopeful at that time; for they knew, as all our armies did, that the year's gain had been small, and the work ahead of them, now that the German divisions, released from Russia were pouring westward, would be heavy. But for the moment they were free of the Somme and its interminable duckboards that led men to death or hard work; its shell-holes floored with icy snow-water, the grave-like chill of its chalk trenches, and the life-sapping damps of the uplands on which they had lain out from nights till mornings.
Here is a memory of those days presented by the teller as a jest. "Aye! Gouzeaucourt and Gonnelieu! I'm not like to forget 'em. I was back from leave, ye'll understand; no more anxious to die than the rest of us. An' there was some new men, too—new young lads just come over. My kit was all new, too, me bein' back from leave. Our C.S.M. dhrew me attention to it one of those merry nights we was poachin' about in No
