Note (Back to main text) — ILLUSTRATION. (continued 4)

As regards myself, however, my days of connection with the Brigade were numbered. I had heard, with mixed but pleasant feelings, that I had been promoted Major-General "for distinguished service" on the 18th February (Weatherby got a brevet majority in the same 'Gazette'), and I was now ordered to go home and report myself in London. My successor was to be Northey, of the 60th Rifles, from Givenchy way, and he turned up on the 2nd March at our Headquarters, which were then at 28 Rue de Lille. I at once recognised that he would carry on excellently well, and had no compunction in leaving the command in his hands. All that was left for me to do was to take a tender farewell of the officers of the Brigade and of my staff, and to publish a final farewell order to the old Brigade. I was very sad at leaving, and had I known what an awful time they were going to have at St Éloi and Hill 60, I should have been sadder still.[28] Of all the regimental officers and men who had left Ireland with me on the 14th August 1914, six and a half months previously, I could count on my ten fingers the number of officers left:—