C.O.; Captain Lord Desmond FitzGerald, Adjutant; Lieutenant C. A. S. Walker, Transport Officer; 2nd Lieutenant L. Straker, Machine-gun Officer; Captain A. H. L. McCarthy, Medical Officer; Captain Rev. Father Gwynne, Chaplain; Lieutenant H. Hickie, Quartermaster. No. 1 Company, Captain E. J. Gough, Lieutenant L. Hargreaves, 2nd Lieutenant A. C. Innes. No. 2 Company, Captain E. Mylne, 2nd Lieutenant H. S. Keating, 2nd Lieutenant F. H. Witts. No. 3 Company, Captain P. L. Reid, 2nd Lieutenant P. H. Antrobus, 2nd Lieutenant Hon. H. V. Harmsworth, 2nd Lieutenant H. Marion-Crawford. No. 4 Company, Lieutenant G. Gough, Lieutenant G. Hubbard, 2nd Lieutenant Lee.
Lieutenant C. A. S. Walker had to go to hospital with bronchitis and Lieutenant Antrobus took over from him.
Major Arbuthnot (Scots Guards) arrived on the 14th December with Queen Alexandra's presents to the Battalion which were duly issued to selected officers, N.C.O.'s, and men, but at the time, the Battalion was under two hours' notice to move either to support an attack then being delivered by the Third Division upon the wood at Wytschaete, or "for any other purpose." The attack was not a success except in so far as it pinned the enemy forces to one place, but the Battalion was not called upon to help. It lived under "short notice" for a week which naturally interfered with extended route-marches or training. Companies were sent out one by one to dig in the water-logged soil and to extemporise means of keeping their feet out of the water by "blocks of wood made in the form of a platform at the bottom of the trenches." Thus laboriously is described the genesis of what was later to grow into thousands of miles of duck-board, plain or wired.
Meantime, between the 20th and 22nd of December the fierce and unsatisfactory battle of Cuinchy, the burden of which fell heavily on our devoted Indian troops, had been fought out on a front of half-a-dozen miles from south of the Béthune Canal to Festubert. Noth-
