At the end of February 1915, the 5th Dragoon guards were in the trenches near Zillebeke, performing more or less cheerfully, the work of infantry, as they had been doing all through that long and dreary winter. Meantime, they themselves were receiving a lesson on the imprudence of yielding to a temptation to admire the landscape, where the enemy’s trenches were not a hundred yards from their own, and there happens to be a wood affording admirable cover for snipers in between. For whenever one of them chanced to raise his head above the parapet, a rifle, and as often as not two or three together, cracked.Among the trees, and if he escaped with a bullet hole through his cap or an ugly furrow along his cheek, he might consider himself fortunate. The unwelcome attentions of the marksmen in the word were becoming a serious nuisance, and Squadron Sergeant Major Croft made up his mind to put a stop to it. He did not believe that the shots came from isolated snipers, since it is seldom that two or more snipers fire almost simultaneously, as so frequently happened in this instance, and came to the conclusion that the Germans must have an advanced post somewhere in the wood. Accordingly, on the afternoon of February 27th, he went out to endeavour to locate it; but before he had penetrated more than a few yards into the wood he was seen and fired upon by the Germans, and obliged to return. However, he had noted the direction from which the shots came, and that night he crept over the parapet of the British trench and crawled into the wood again. The task in which he had undertaken always very dangerous work-was rendered the more hazardous by the fact that there was a bright moon. But, on the other hand the wood had been so damaged by shellfire, that fallen trees and broken branches were lying everywhere, and on a dark night it would have been almost impossible for him to move about without making a noise which would have attracted the enemy’s attention.