eighteen pounders to their new positions or follows them with
ammunition. Far out on the field I have seen groups of artillery horses
waiting in a dip in the ground while their guns were within five hundred
yards of the firing-line, and winding across dead fields toward an
isolated battery the caisson horses trotting along with shells bursting
around them.

Upon August days when the breeze that passed overhead was only
tantalization to men in communication trenches carrying up ammunition
and bombs, when dugouts were ovens, when the sun made the steel helmet a
hot skillet-lid over throbbing temples, the horse-drawn water carts
wound up the slope to assuage burning thirst and back again, between the
gates of hell and the piping station, making no more fuss than a country
postman on his rounds.

Practically all the water that the fighters had, aside from what was in
their canteens, must be brought up in this way, for the village wells
were filled with the remains of shell-crushed houses. Gossips of battle
the water men, they and the stretcher-bearers both non-combatants going
and coming under the shells up to the battle line, but particularly so
the water men, who passed the time of day with every branch, each
working in its own compartment. When the weather was bad the water man's
business became slack and the lot of the stretcher-bearer grew worse in
the mud. What stories the stretcher-bearers brought in of wounded blown
off litters by shells, of the necessity of choosing the man most likely
to survive when only one of two could be carried, of whispered messages
from the dying, and themselves keeping to their work with cheery British
phlegm; and the water men told of new gun positions, of where the shells
were thickest, of how the fight was going.

It irritated the water men, prosaic in their disregard of danger, to
have a tank hit on the way out. If it were hit on the way back when it
was empty this was of less account, for new tanks were waiting in
reserve. Tragedy for them was when a horse was killed and often they
returned with horses wounded. It did not occur to the man that he might
be hit; it was the loss of a horse or a tank that worried him. One had
his cart knocked over by a salvo of shells and set upright by the next,
whereupon, according to the account, he said to his mare: "Come on,
Mary, I always told you the Boches were bad shots!" But there are too
many stories of the water men to repeat without sifti