furious summer thunderstorms which, from time to time, flooded the trenches and woke up more fever. The front line held here by the Guards was badly knocked about and battered, and instructions ran that, in event of serious attack, it would not be contested.
There is no clear evidence of the state of the Battalion's collective mind at this time, but from home letters it might be gathered that the strain of the Bush and its bewilderment had given place to the idea that great things were preparing. Battalions are very often told tales to this effect, but they suit themselves as to the amount that they swallow. No power on earth, for instance, could have persuaded the veterans of the Somme, after Cambrai, that there was "anything doing"; but as the summer of 1918 grew warmer in the wooded and orchard country behind the Amiens-Albert line, and our lines there held and were strengthened, and those who had been home or on the seas reported what they had heard and seen, hope, of a kind not raised before, grew in the talks of the men and the officers. ("Understand, I do not say there was anny of the old chat regardin' that the war would finish next Chuseday, the way we talked in '16. But, whatever they said acrost the water, we did not hould 'twould endure those two more extra years all them civilians was dishin' out to us. What did we think? That '19 would see the finish? 'Twud be hard to tell what we thought. Leave it this way—we was no more than waitin' on mercies to happen an'—'twas mericles that transpired!")
They relieved their own brigade battalions with the punctilio proper to their common ritual, and for the benefit of over a hundred recruits. It was their ancient comrades under all sorts of terrors, the 2nd Coldstream, whose guides from Boiry-St. Martin one night lost their way in the maze of tracks and turns to the front line. But, as meekly set forth in the Diary, when it came the Battalion's turn to be relieved by the 2nd Grenadiers, "all tracks had been carefully picketed by this Battalion to assist grenadier companies coming in
