all crawled under waterproof sheets, and slept until daylight allowed us to arrange something more substantial.  The next day, with the aid of a few “scrounged” top poles and some string, every man made himself some sort of weather-proof hutch, while the combined tent-valises of the officers were grouped together near the farm, which was used as mess and Quartermaster’s Stores.  Unfortunately, we had no sooner made ourselves really comfortable than the Staffordshires claimed the field as part of their area, and we had to move to a similar billeting area a few hundred yards outside Reninghelst where we stayed until the 28th.  The weather remained hot and fine, except for two very heavy showers in the middle of one day, when most of the officers could be seen making furious efforts to dig drains round their bivouacs from inside, while the other ranks stood stark naked round the field and enjoyed the pleasures of a cold shower-bath.  We spent our time training and providing working parties, one of which, consisting of 400 men under Capt.  Jeffries, for work at Zillebeke, proved an even greater fiasco than its predecessor in May.  For on this occasion, not only was the night very short, but the guides failed to find the work, and the party eventually returned to bivouacs, having done nothing except wander about the salient for three hours.  Two days before we left Reninghelst the first reinforcements arrived for us, consisting of 12 returned casualties and 80 N.C.O.’s and men from England—­a very welcome addition to our strength.

The time eventually arrived for us to go into the line, and on the 29th the officers went up by day to take over from the Sherwood Foresters, while the remainder of the Battalion followed as soon as it was dark.  Mud roads and broad cross-country tracks brought us over the plain to the “Indian Transport Field,” near Kruisstraat White Chateau, still standing untouched because, it was said, its peace-time owner was a Boche.  Leaving the Chateau on our right, and passing Brigade Headquarters Chalet on our left, we kept to the road through Kruisstraat as far as the outskirts of Ypres, where a track to the right led us to Bridge 14 over the Ypres-Comines Canal.  Thence, by field tracks, we crossed the Lille road a few yards north of Shrapnel Corner, and leaving on our left the long, low, red buildings of the “Ecole de Bienfaisance,” reached Zillebeke Lake close to the white house at the N.W. corner.  The lake is triangular and entirely artificial, being surrounded by a broad causeway, 6 feet high, with a pathway along the top.  On the western edge the ground falls away, leaving a bank some twenty feet high, in which were built the “Lake Dug-outs,”—­the home of one of the support battalions.  From the corner house to the trenches there were two routes, one by the south side of the Lake, past Railway Dug-outs—­cut into the embankment of the Comines Railway—­and Manor Farm to Square Wood; the other, which we followed, along the North side of the Lake, where a trench cut