in which, for the sake of economy, captured enemy rifles and ammunition were used.
By this time the whole front was split up into small or large scattered posts in trenches or under cover, each held down by machine-guns which punished every movement. Two Companies (2 and 4) were near the St. Léger Trees, a clump of nine trees on the St. Léger-Ecoust road, mixed up with the Coldstream posts. The other two were dug in behind the Grenadiers on the right. Battalion Headquarters circulated spasmodically and by rushes, when it saw its chance, from one point to the other of the most unwholesome ground. Even at the time, some of its shell-hole conferences struck the members as comic; but history does not record the things that were said by dripping officers between mouthfuls of dirt and gas.
Every battle has its special characteristic. St. Léger was one of heat, sunshine, sweat; the flavour of at least two gases tasted through respirators or in the raw; the wail of machine-gun bullets sweeping the crests of sunken roads; the sudden vision of wounded in still-smoking shell-holes or laid in the sides of a scarp; sharp whiffs of new-spilt blood, and here and there a face upon which the sun stared without making any change. So the hours wore on, under a sense of space, heat, and light; Death always just over the edge of that space and impudently busy in that light.
About what would have been tea-time in the real world, Captain Paget, a man of unhurried and careful speech and imperturbable soul, reported to the C.O., whom he found by the St. Léger Trees, that there were "Huns on his right—same trench as himself." It was an awkward situation that needed mending before dusk, and it was made worse by the posts of the Coldstream and some Guards Machine-Guns' posts, as well as those of our No. 4 Company, being mixed up within close range of No. 2. The C.O. decided that if a barrage could be brought to bear on the trench and its rather crowded neighbourhood, No. 2 might attack it. A young gunner, Fowler by name, cast up at that junc-
