It was nearly two o’clock, and the daylight was devoid of mystery when I arrived at Kinjack’s headquarters. The circumstances now made it permissible for me to feel tired and hungry, but for the moment I rather expected congratulations. My expectation was an error. Kinjack sat glowering in a surface dugout in a sandpit at the edge of Bottom Wood. I went in from the sunlight. The overworked Adjutant eyed me sadly from a corner of an ammunition-box table covered with a grey blanket, and the Colonel’s face caused me to feel like a newly captured prisoner. Angrily he asked why I hadn’t come back with my company bombers in the early morning. I said I’d stayed up there to see what was happening. Why hadn’t I consolidated Wood Trench? Why the hell hadn’t I sent back a message to let him know that it had been occupied? I made no attempt to answer these conundrums. Obviously I’d made a mess of the whole affair. The Corps Artillery bombardment had been held up for three hours because Kinjack couldn’t report that “my patrol” had returned to Quadrangle Trench, and altogether he couldn’t be blamed for feeling annoyed with me, especially as he’d been ticked off over the telephone by the Brigadier (in Morse Code dots and dashes, I suppose). I looked at him with a sulky grin, and went along to Barton with a splitting headache and a notion that I ought to be thankful that I was back at all.
In the evening we were relieved. The incoming Battalion numbered more than double our own strength (we were less than 400) and they were unseasoned New Army troops. Our little trench under the trees was inundated by a jostling company of exclamatory Welshmen. Kinjack would have called them a panicky rabble. They were mostly undersized men, and as I watched them arriving at the first stage of their battle experience I had a sense of their victimization. A little platoon officer was settling his men down with a valiant show of self-assurance. For the sake of appearances, orders of some kind had to be given, though in reality there was nothing to do except sit down and hope it wouldn’t rain. He spoke sharply to some of them, and I felt that they were like a lot of