My Brigade arrived in the dark by the time that I had received further instructions in detail, and was parked off the road (south side) half a mile further on, whilst Weatherby went on to make arrangements for their taking up the line, taking representatives of the battalions with him. I met General Capper (commanding 7th Division) at his dug-out in the wood close by, and he told me that his Division had been reduced to barely 3000 men and a very few officers, after an appalling amount of severe fighting.
Weatherby came back after a time, and the battalions and ourselves moved off along the road and branched off into the grounds of Herenthage Château—deep mud, broken trees, and hardly rideable. Here we bade adieu to our horses, who were, with the transport, to stay in the same place where we had had our dinners, right the other side of Ypres and out of shell-range, whilst we kept a few ammunition-carts and horses hidden near Hooge village. All the rest of our supplies and stuff had to be brought up every night under cover of darkness to near Herenthage, and there be unloaded and carried by hand into the trenches.
In the château itself who should we come across but Drysdale,[16] Brigade-Major now of the 22nd Brigade, the one which, by the law of chances, we were now relieving; and, still more oddly, the other battalion (2nd) of the Bedfords was in his Brigade. It was a cheerless place, this château—every single pane of glass in it shivered, and lying, crunched at our every step, on the floor.
We pushed on over the grass of the park, through the scattered trees, and into the wood, and so into the trenches. Even then, as far as one could judge in the darkness, the ground was a regular rabbit-warren. By the time we had finished with the district the ground was even more so; there seemed to be more trenches and fallen trees and wire entanglements than there was level ground to walk on.
Our own Headquarters were in a poky little dug-out[17] in a wood, not 200 yards from our firing trenches. There was just room for two—Weatherby and St André (Moulton-Barrett having gone to settle about transport and supplies, Cadell being away sick, and Beilby being left with the transport the other side of Ypres)—to lie down in it, and there was a little tunnel out of it, 6 feet long and 2 broad and 2 high, into which I crept and where I slept; but I was not very happy in it, as the roof-logs had sagged with the weight of the earth on them, and threatened every moment to fall in whilst I was inside.
The Bedfords were put into the trenches on the eastern edge of the wood, the Cheshires continued the line to the south and for a couple of hundred yards outside the wood, and the West Ridings were in reserve at the back of the wood, in rear of our dug-out.
I did not like our place at all, for it seemed to me that, being so close to the firing line, I should not be able to get out or control the little force if there were heavy operations on; and this was exactly what did happen.
We had been told that the 6th Cavalry Brigade was in trenches on our left, and the 7th Infantry Brigade in ditto on our right, and that was about all we knew of the situation.