After a day of field sports they were having a boxing-match in an old barn, very merry and bright, before that news came to them. General Haldane had given me a quiet word about it, and I watched the boxing, and the faces of all those men, crowded round the ring, with pity for the frightful disappointment that was about to fall on them, like a sledgehammer. I knew some of their officers⁠—Colonel Dyson of the Royal Scots, and Captain Heathcote, who hated the war and all its ways with a deadly hatred, having seen much slaughter of men and of their own officers. Colonel Dyson was the seventeenth commanding officer of his battalion, which had been commanded by every officer down to second lieutenant, and had only thirty men left of the original crowd. They had been slain in large numbers in that “holding attack” by Hooge on September 25th, during the battle of Loos, as I have told. Now they were “going in” again, and were very sorry for themselves, but hid their feelings from their men. The men were tough and stalwart lads, tanned by the wind and rain of a foul winter, thinned down by the ordeal of those months in the line under daily bouts of fire. In a wooden gallery of the barn a mass of them lay in deep straw, exchanging caps, whistling, shouting, in high spirits.