g pits for their ammunition. In due course
someone might tell them to begin registering on a certain point or to
turn loose on one which they had already registered. Meanwhile, very
workmanlike in their shirt-sleeves, they had no concern with the traffic
in the rear, except as it related to their own supply of shells, or with
the litter of the field, or the dead, or the burial parties and the
scattered wounded passing back from the firing-line. Their business
relations were exclusively with the battle area hidden by the bluff. I
thought that they were "rather fond of themselves" (as the British say)
that morning, though not so much so, perhaps, as the crew of the
eighteen pounders still farther forward within about a thousand yards of
the Germans whom they were pelting with shrapnel.

Ordinarily, the eighteen pounders were expected to keep a distance of
four or five thousand yards; but this was "rather an unusual occasion"
as an officer explained. It would never do for the eighteen pounders to
be wall-flowers; they must be on the ballroom floor. Had these men who
were mechanically slipping shells into the gun-breeches slept last night
or the previous night? Oh, yes, for two or three hours when they were
not firing.

What did fatigue matter to an eighteen-pounder spirit released from the
eternal grind of trench warfare and pushing across the open in the way
that eighteen pounders were meant to do? Weren't they horse artillery?
What use had they had for their horses in the immovable Ypres salient
except when they drew back their guns to the billets after their tour of
duty?--they who had drilled and drilled in evolutions in England under
the impression that field guns were a mobile arm!

When orders came on the afternoon of July 1st to go ahead "right into
it" it was like a summons to a holiday for a desk-ridden man brought up
in the Rockies. Out into the night with creaking wheels and caissons
following with sharp words of urging from the sergeant, "Now, wheelers,
as I taught you at Aldershot," as they went across old trenches or up a
stiff slope and into the darkness, with transport giving them the right
of way, and on to a front that was in motion, with officers studying
their maps and directions by the pocket flashlight--this was something
like. And a young lieutenant hurried forward to where the rifles were
talking to signal back the results of the guns firing from the midst of
the battle. Something like, indeed! T