any food or cover. I thought it was wise therefore
to go to Deligny's Mill, where I understood the machine-gunners were
established. In the road at the entrance of Haynecourt, I found a
young German wounded in the foot and very sorry for himself. I think
he was asking me to carry him, but I saw he could walk and so showed
him the direction in which to make his way back to our aid posts. I
was just going back over the fields when I met a company of our light
trench mortar batteries. The men halted for a rest and sat down by the
road, and an officer came and said to me, "Come and cheer up the men,
Canon, they have dragged two guns eight kilometres in the dust and
heat and they are all fed up." I went over to them, and, luckily
having a tin of fifty cigarettes in my pocket, managed to make them go
round. I asked the O.C. if he would like me to spend the night with
them. He said he would, so I determined not to go back. Some of the
men asked me if I knew where they could get water. I told them they
might get some in the village, so off we started. It makes a curious
feeling go through one to enter a place which has just been evacuated
by the enemy. In the evening light, the little brick village looked
quite ghostly with its silent streets and empty houses. We turned into
a large farmyard, at the end of which we saw a well with a pump. One
of the men went down into the cellar of the house hunting for
souvenirs, and soon returned with a German who had been hiding there.
We were just about to fill our water-bottles, when I suggested that
perhaps the well had been poisoned. I asked the German, "Gutt wasser?"
"Ja, ja," Then I said, "Gutt drinken?" "Nein, nein," he replied,
shaking his head. "Well, Sir," the men said, "we are going to drink it
anyway." "But if the well is poisoned," I replied, "it won't do you
much good." "How can you find out?" they said. A brilliant idea
flashed upon me. "I tell you what, boys," I said, "we will make the
German drink it himself and see the effect." The men roared with
laughter, and we filled a bottle with the suspected liquid and made
the unfortunate prisoner drink every drop of it. When he had finished,
we waited for a few minutes (like the people who watched St. Paul on
the Island of Melita after he had shaken off the viper into the (p. 313)
fire) to see if he would swell up or die, but as nothing of that kind
happened we all began to fill our water-bottles. Just as the last man
was about t