At dawn the following morning, 14th March, we were ordered to be ready to go and support the Staffordshires, but, after considerable uncertainty and waiting, this order was cancelled.  Instead, a flagged plan of the Bucquoy trenches was made on the plain N.W. of our village, and here we practised the attack.  The weather was bad, but we managed to make all the necessary arrangements and do some attack drill.  In the village we had a singular stroke of ill luck.  One solitary German Howitzer shell dropped amongst a party of “D” Company, killing Pte.  J.T.  Allen, who had done good work in the bombing at Gommecourt, and wounding six others, one of whom, W. Clarke, died of wounds afterwards.  The practised attack, which should have taken place from Biez Wood on the 16th, never came off, for it was made unnecessary by the rapidity of the German retirement.

After this the weather improved, and it was bright and warm when, on the 17th, we moved during the afternoon into Gommecourt and came temporarily under orders of the 139th Brigade.  The following day we moved again, this time to dug-outs and fields 500 yards North of Essarts, country which the enemy had now entirely evacuated.  The villages and farms had all been very badly battered by our Artillery, and the Boche had found time to destroy almost everything before he went, except at Douchy, where there was some good dug-out timber.  Needless to say, the famous Mary of that village was not to be found.  The French were immensely pleased at regaining part of their lost territory, though it was a pathetic sight to see some of the old people coming to look at the piles of bricks which had once been their homes.  Two ladies came to Gommecourt with a key, little thinking that so far from finding a lock they would find not even a door or door-way—­there was not even a brick wall more than two feet high.  Those officers who could get horses rode round to look at the country which for nine months we had been watching through telescopes, and the concrete emplacements of Monchy and Le Quesnoy Farm were all explored, while No Man’s Land, the only place free from wire and shell holes, provided an excellent canter.  The Companies were largely employed in road mending, filling up German mine craters, and making tracks across the trenches for our Artillery.  The enemy seemed to be really on the move at last, and we were all looking forward to seeing some new country, but on the 20th the weather broke, there was another fall of snow, and we were not sorry to be ordered back to Souastre, where we went into the huts for two nights.

For the rest of March we were constantly on the move, mostly by march route.  First, on the 22nd, we marched via Couin and Bus-les-Artois to Bertrancourt, where we found some huts and much mud.  One very large “Nissen” hut provided an Officers’ Mess, but was completely devoid of all furniture until the Colonel invented some wonderful hanging tables—­table tops hung from the ceiling on telephone wires.