ers in the alert confident manner
so well known to all his officers and men.

"Send a cycle orderly to stop Fentiman bringing up his teams! You can
be ready to march by 3 P.M. ... Stone. Townsend, you'd better send off
your groom to warn your battery! Times and order of march will be sent
out by the adjutant within a quarter of an hour! One hundred yards'
distance between every six vehicles on the march! No motor-lorries for
us this time, so all extra kit and things you can't carry will have to
be dumped, and a guard left behind!"

A clatter of horsemen spreading the news followed.

I stood at the door of the village's one cafe and watched two of our
batteries pass. The good woman who kept it asked if I thought the
Germans would come there again. "They took my husband with them a
prisoner when they went a year ago," she said slowly. My trust in our
strength as I had seen it six months before helped me to reassure her;
but to change the subject, I turned to the penny-in-the-slot music
machine inside, the biggest, most gaudily painted musical box I've ever
seen. "Did the Boches ever try this?" I asked. "No, only once," she
replied, brightening. "They had a mess in the next room, and never came
in here."

"Well, I'll have a pen'orth for luck," said I, and avoiding "Norma"
and "Poet and Peasant," moved the pointer towards a chansonette,
something about a good time coming. Such a monstrous wheezing and
gurgling, such a deafening clang of cracked cymbals, such a Puck-like
concatenation of flat notes and sudden thuds that told of broken
strings! And so much of it for a ten-centime piece. When the tumult
began a third time I made off. No wonder the Germans only tried the
instrument once!

By 8 P.M. we found ourselves in a sort of junction village, its two
main roads alive with long lines of moving batteries and lorries and
transport waggons. Inky blackness everywhere, for the Hun bombed the
place nightly, and "No lights" was a standing order. Odd shouts and
curses from drivers in difficulties with their steeds; the continuous
cry of "Keep to the right!" from the military police; from a garden
close by, the howl of an abandoned dog; and from some dilapidated house
Cockney voices harmonising: "It's a Long, Long Trail." There would be
no moon that night, and a moaning wind was rising.

A halt had been called in front of our column, and there was talk of
the batteries watering their horses before completing the further three