Those conferences took place in the Second Army headquarters on Cassel Hill, in a big building which was a casino before the war, with a far-reaching view across Flanders, so that one could see in the distance the whole sweep of the Ypres salient, and southward the country below Notre Dame de Lorette, with Merville and Hazebrouck in the foreground. Often we assembled in a glass house, furnished with trestle tables on which maps were spread, and, thinking back to these scenes, I remember now, as I write, the noise of rain beating on that glass roof, and the clammy touch of fog on the windowpanes stealing through the cracks and creeping into the room. The meteorologist of the Second Army was often a gloomy prophet, and his prophecies were right. How it rained on nights when hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were waiting in their trenches to attack in a murky dawn!⁠ ⁠… We said good night to General Harington, each one of us, I think, excited by the thought of the drama of human life and death which we had heard in advance in that glass house on the hill; to be played out by flesh and blood before many hours had passed.