Preparations at Armentières

On the 1st of May, 2016, Sydney Williams was transferred to the Trench Mortar Battery of the 3rd Brigade, stationed at Le Ciseaux - one of the villages referred to in my previous post. According to New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914-18, the Brigade commanding officer was Lt-Colonel Ivon Standish, DSO, mentioned in this Stuff article, Veterans of three wars, excerpted below:

Having served in the second Boer War, Standish went on to be a highly regarded artillery officer in WWI, receiving a Distinguished Service Order for extinguishing a fire in the ammunition pit under a maelstrom of bullets. ... 

... men like Standish would not have seen much action, if any, in South Africa as many would have arrived after the war was over. But their arrival at the front during WWI was a rude awakening. 

"South African war veterans talking about Gallipoli said how they'd seen more shells and more bullets in one day than they had in a year in South Africa."

Of Armentières, where the New Zealand Division were about to go into battle later in May, New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914-18, says it:

... had for long been a quiet sector, undisturbed by any of the fierce contests which had raged along other parts of the long battle front. It was a good breaking-in ground for a Division which had seen no previous fighting, and it was a suitable place in which to "spell" a Division which had been heavily engaged. 

The New Zealand Division, fully reinforced and rested and strengthened after its hard but splendid service on Gallipoli, came to France confident in its strength and vigour, and eager to prove its quality in the new arena; but there was yet much to be learned of the complexities of a system of warfare which, new in itself, was subject to changes almost every day. Without this necessarily accurate knowledge and the perfection and thoroughness of organisation insistently demanded as a primary condition of success, valour and endurance would avail but little.