COMMAND

WE marched through Merville, Vieille Chapelle and Lacouture to Richebourg St. Vaast, an empty shell of a village. Bombardment had driven away all its inhabitants and had left gaping holes in its red-bricked outline. The church was little more than a grey scree of stone, and as the buildings near to it had suffered more severely than those in the outskirts of the village, there was a progression of decayed brickwork visible to the eye. One wall had already become a heap of rubble tidily piled at a street corner so as to allow free movement over the cobbles; a little further back, what was once a house was now but a ten-foot ruin; behind this the curve rose to a house damaged but not disarticulated, with a part of the roof miraculously poised over its frame. Here and there a garden had run wild into long dark grass, and through an orchard on one side ran an aimless trench, now overgrown with weeds. We dumped our equipment in good corners of the most habitable rooms, staking a hasty claim, then finding a better pitch and abandoning the first found, but a burst of shellfire brought our explorings to a quick end. The enemy had in all probability observed our march, or our entry into the village, and for an hour we were heavily shelled. A shell-burst, even in the soft mud of the trenches, seemed the greatest noise on earth, but when I heard a succession of ‘five-nines’ hitting these houses I plumbed depths of terror hitherto undiscovered by me. I found it hard to maintain an appearance of unconcern while these monsters were stealing out of the silence into a hiss and a burst, reverberating in a rumble that lingered for some time as if it were loath to cease its echoing. I had begun to eat, but food dried in my mouth. I stopped and lit a cigarette, walked up and down the room, wondering whether it were better to remain indoors, risking a fall of brick, than to be outside, exposed to flying pieces of shell splinters. It did not seem to matter. A greater need was to find something to do, so I went from house to house talking to the small groups of men. In time of danger, the greatest burden of all is enforced inactivity. An hour passed incredibly slowly before the shelling ceased, and when we came to count the cost, we found that two men had been killed, and five seriously wounded. At night we carried stores up to Richebourg l’Avoué, and there, a little behind the front line, we spent five hours digging a communication trench through the village cemetery— an evil task, even in winter. The next day we were so heavily shelled in our village that we were forced to seek shelter in the scattered trenches and in the ditches outside. That night we went into the front line at Richebourg l’Avoué, to take complete charge of a sector for the first time; the war was now surging round our feet, and it was hard to believe that less than a month ago we were wondering what a trench looked like. This trench was wet and ill-built; there were but few fire-bays where the water was not ankle-deep above the duckboards, and in most parts it was knee-deep On the extreme right of the company front the trench abandoned its useless struggle against the encroaching water and stopped abruptly, leaving rows of rusty barbed wire entanglements to keep a silent watch on the enemy. At night we sent out a patrol to make contact with our neighbours across the gap. The division we had relieved left its artillery to cover our front— noisy fellows, easily stirred to strife, and much given to wire-cutting. There was water in our narrow dug-out, so narrow that I could not lie full length on the bench at the back of it. It was difficult to sleep, and the labour of wading through water added greatly to the fatigue of the four long days and nights. Our artillery bombarded the enemy’s wire, his artillery shelled our trenches in retaliation: our guns, regarding this as an insult, doubled their fury, and the enemy responded to the challenge. The infantry sat and suffered, cursing all artillery, allied or enemy. What task was more pressing than the draining of wet trenches, rebuilding fire-bays, and making dug-outs sound enough to keep out the rain? A dug-out in this sector was not a hole in the ground; it was a child’s clumsy effort to build a little one-roomed house, with sandbags full of viscous mud for bricks. It had no foundation, no frame, no structure. For a roof, some sheets of corrugated iron were laid on two or three timbers resting on the sandbag walls, and on the iron a course or two of sandbags. Most of the dug-outs were bullet-proof, certainly, but a direct hit with a light shell would destroy the best of them. if we improved one place, the enemy artillery, responding to our gun-fire, would bring our work to naught. Artillery was meant to cover or to stop an attack; if there was no attack, then let the guns fire at their own true opponents, the enemy artillery. Thus spake the infantry, and I am quite sure that across No Man’s Land, Saxon and Bavarian spoke the same words. At this time our guns were short of shells. If we asked the artillery to fire in retaliation for a drubbing of our line, the response did not equal the original offence, which increased our annoyance at what we thought to be wasteful shelling.

At night a trench mortar officer set his guns in a derelict trench about twenty yards behind the line and carried up his ammunition, heavy globes of iron with a little cylindrical projection like a broken handle In the morning I moved the men from the bays between the trench mortars and their target, to lighten the risk of loss from the retaliatory fire A pop, and then a black ball went soaring up, spinning round as it went through the air slowly, more pops and more queer birds against the sky A stutter of terrific detonations seemed to shake the air and the ground, sandbags and bits of timber sailed up slowly and fell in a calm deliberate way. In the silence that followed the explosions, an angry voice called out in English, across No Man’s Land, ‘YOU BLOODY WELSH MURDERERS.’

The trench mortar team hurried away, pleased with their shooting—as they always were—and left us to wait for the shelling of our line. It did not begin immediately, as we had expected. An hour passed, then another, until the suspense became harder to bear than a bombardment. In the late afternoon, when we had decided that the enemy was going to swallow this insult and we had resumed our mud-building and irrigation, a sudden fury of shell-fire turned our poor trench into a field of spouting volcanoes, spattering mud up into the air. The angry hiss, of 77’s, the ponderous whirr of 5.9’s, the dull empty whack of bombs and the whipping crack of shrapnel all merged into a sea of noise. Ten minutes of this drove us into a stupor of fear, and fear brought its terrible thirst; there was nothing to do but to sit still, half crouched against the wall of the trench, waiting, waiting. Every moment we expected to hear a shout of ‘Stretcher-bearers at the double’, but it never came. The storm ended as suddenly as it began; now was the time to count the cost. By some uncommon stroke of luck, not one man was wounded or killed, and in ten minutes we drank the best cup of tea ever made on this earth.

We found the cottage marked ‘Company Mess’ to be furnished a little better than its counterpart in other villages. There was a good lamp, a marble-topped sideboard, and one arm-chair upholstered in red plush. Madame was willing to lend us plates and cups, provided that we paid for any damage done. Two of our subalterns, stirred by this sudden luxury, had gone to Béthune to buy a gramophone, ‘lorry-hopping’ there and back. Two records had been broken on the journey home, but two had survived; one a song called ‘Red Devon’, the other a song whose title was, I think, ‘Gaiway by the Sea’. I have forgotten the words of both, and the tune of the first, but I shall never forget the melody of the second. It was an ordinary ballad, poor enough, and soaked in sentiment, buoyed up by the most conventional of chord sequences, but for me it is one of a few pieces of music that set in motion a whole complex of waves. The waves of sound are the least important in this response; I see more than I hear. A shuttered room, an oil lamp throwing dingy shadows of a bottle of wine and a loaf on a table covered with yellow varnished American cloth; maps and typewritten orders, a Sam Browne belt hanging over the back of a chair, Billy sitting down with unbuttoned tunic, brooding silently, his young face clouded and morose, hearing in the simple tune a world of things he could not say; other good men who shared with me the hard days of war but did not live to look back upon them with a profound and unending feeling of miraculous deliverance. Music is a key that can open strange rooms in the house of memory. Some time after this, I rejoined my battalion in a village far behind the line. I was at the very nadir of my military fortunes, having failed, for ever as I thought, to secure a prize so near to my hand. As I walked along the~vi1lage street to the company mess, I heard a gramophone playing Chaminade’s ‘Danse Créole’, and I can never hear it now without its accompaniment of failure and despondency.

After an evening and a day of listening to these two ballads, we began to wish for some variety of entertainment. The two broken records were in a lighter vein, we were told. A longing for any part of England must needs be set in a minor key of sentiment, but a yearning for the Southern states of America could find a cheerful expression. Another trip to Béthune brought into our repertoire a syncopated ditty with the ironical title of ‘This is the Life’. Three lines of it have wedged themselves into my memory, possibly because of their vivid untruth:

I love the cows AND chickens
BUT this is the life,
OH this is the life....

The rest of the song has faded away, buried by that very life of which it sang.

In these days we went more than half-way to meet and welcome any diversion to the eye or the ear, or any colouring of the ever-moving but never-changing environment. It was this that made of a gramophone, and of Kirchner’s drawings of thin-legged, silk-stockinged women, not a luxury, nor a decoration, but furniture in every mess. The drawings were pinned on the dingy walls of country cottages whose womenfolk seemed of another species, not easily recognizable as contemporary, and in dug-outs where the silk stockings shone against the background of sackcloth. They pleased the eye, but a cynic might say that they offered nothing more than a liqueur to a man parched with thirst.

The company commander was reading the battalion orders, beginning with the duties of the morrow, passing through the local gossip and the much-travelled snippets of wisdom from G.H.Q., when he burst into laughter. The mess was lingering over a bottle of thin red wine of unknown derivation, and we looked up in surprise.

‘Griff,’ he said, ‘you have got a job.’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Listen. . . . A Brigade class in cookery will be held at Battalion Headquarters—why, it’s to-morrow—one company cook will be detailed from each battalion to report at ten a.m.—you’ve got to take command of the class.’
‘I command a cookery class? Why, it’s nonsense—what do I know about cooking? I’m going to see the adjutant now. . . . Hand me my belt.’

I disappeared, leaving behind me a cackle of laughter and much wit about the sick parades that would follow, and found the adjutant finishing his coffee. I harangued him and argued with him, but to no purpose; it was a Brigade order, and the order said that I was to take command of the class. The only advice I could get was to stay up all night trying to rake together some semblance of knowledge, but I did convince him that the assistance of the battalion master-cook was essential to the success of the venture.

I traced the expert to an outhouse where he stood knife in hand, a grimy figure, flanked by enormous sides of bacon, pieces of cheese, and sacks full of bread.

‘Sergeant, you’ve got to start a cooking class with me to-morrow morning.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said calmly, as if this were a matter of no moment.
‘You had better begin thinking hard what to do and say, for I’m blest if I know anything about cooking. You’ll have to do the talking. The class is going to last for four solid days. How on earth are we to keep these fellows quiet for all that time?’
‘Don’t you worry, sir—we’ll find ‘em plenty to do. . . I got’n idea, sir.. . I was on a class myself once. . . . We’ll teach them to make ovens and to make puddings.’
‘Splendid,’ said I; ‘I like the “We”.’
‘Don’t you fret, sir, I’ll come round at nine o’clock to-morrow and we’ll find a good place for to teach ‘em.’

I walked back to the mess and burrowed in the depths of my kit-bag until I found that encyclopædia of military lore—Field Service Regulations. There was sure to be something about cooking in this manual—indeed I had a dim recollection of drawings of ovens and neatly arranged pots and dixies. I sat up late that night, fuddling my brain with technical terms until I felt confident of my ability to conceal my ignorance behind vague sentences full of the jargon of the craft. I had served long enough in the army to know the value of words. To throw a few ‘bracketings’ into a talk with a gunner, or to introduce an odd ‘revetment’ into a conversation with an engineer, was more than a friendly acknowledgement of the importance of his trade in your everyday life; it created an atmosphere of temporary equality, of unity of purpose, and a presupposition of vast reserves of undisclosed knowledge. Being infantry, we had no rich vocabulary of craft jargon, and we succumbed easily to the temptation to use other people’s words, with a slight self-consciousness in their handling.

In the morning Sergeant Smith came to my billet, looking strangely clean and fresh, so different from the stew-coloured figure of the evening that I stared at him.

‘Put my best tunic on, sir, and I washed my overalls last night and put them in the cookhouse to dry.’ In his hand he held an unused note-book, a badge of his new office. We walked to a farmhouse where he had discovered a small unused barn, open on one side, with a wooden table: this was to be our laboratory.

‘If you was to go to the Quartermaster Sergeant, sir, and ask him to save some currants and a bit of flour, I could show them how to make a pudding. He’d do it for you, sir, he would, and I could get a few things together here ready to start.’

I went obediently, and was promised currants, but there was no flour.

‘No matter, sir, we’ll show ‘em how to make flour from biscuits.’

Four men arrived, dumped their rifles and kit in a corner, and stood in a row while I addressed them.

‘The object of this course’, said I, with an air of great wisdom, ‘is to see what can be done to vary the diet, using only the rations that are issued. We think it possible to make boiled puddings, to roast meat, and to make rissoles with bully and biscuit.’ Sergeant Smith nodded encouragingly. ‘I’m sure you’ll agree that it is worth going to a little trouble to get a change from stew and curried stew. Sergeant Smith will give demonstrations. Carry on, Sergeant.’

He carried on. He pounded biscuits into flour, made a currant pudding, using bacon drip for lard, tied the agglomerate in a flew sandbag, and boiled it in a dixie. I went for a walk while the pudding boiled, and came back to find five men eating it. I joined them. It was a plain unobjectionable pudding of the plum duff variety, very filling, but undoubtedly a pudding. The sandbag left a certain amount of fluff, but not enough to worry a soldier. Encouraged by this success, we made rissoles of bully, powdered biscuit and bacon drip— they were also very satisfying. Our greatest triumph was the conversion of two oil drums into an oven—I call this ‘our’ triumph because my ignorance of cooking did not prevent me from giving assistance in the solution of a mechanical problem. The ordinary field oven of the text-book was a hit and miss affair; you put a fire in your oven, raked it out and put the meat in, and when you took out the joint it was cooked—or not. Using two oil drums, we contrived to maintain a fire under the oven while the joint was being cooked, and we were able to open the oven to turn the meat.

One afternoon the Brigadier called to see us. He said he would sample our cooking, so we offered him a rissole and a slab of currant duff. He praised them highly, and bravely ate both. He already had the Victoria Cross. The class was a success, and he said that it was to be repeated on every occasion of our coming out of the line, and that I was to take charge of it. I walked with him towards the road.

‘Do you inspect the men’s rifles every morning?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ said I, vowing to start the next morning.
‘Where did you pick up your knowledge of cooking?’
‘I haven’t any, sir; all the cooking I have ever done is to make my own breakfast in Chambers in the Temple.’
‘Well, you’ve got a good sergeant, which is equally to your credit.’

I taught nothing, but I learnt a great deal. When we went back to the line I gave permission to the company cooks to stay behind with the cooker on condition that the rations were supplemented every night by a boiled pudding or rissoles; if the supplement were lacking, they were to come up to the line next day. The supply never failed.

In our early days in the line, the multitude of small cares and the unbroken sequence of starting a score of new tasks in different places, all calling for constant supervision, brought with them a strange busyness. The body moved from bay to bay, tiring itself in the long hours of wading through mud and water. Four days in the trenches were four days and nights of walking and standing, with shoulders aching from the drag of wet clothes. To lie down for two hours on a plank, half sinking into a dream ridden sleep, half hearing every noise within the radius of audibility, imagining in every step that approached the dug-out a summons to return to the world of concentrated attention; this was little rest to body or to mind. On such a bed flesh was no protection to the bones; it was a small envelope containing a jumble of crossing nerves, warring with themselves, and raised to a state of red-hot sensitivity. Bone pressed down upon, and wood forced up against this thin cushion until the sting changed slowly into a dragging pain. Getting up was a process of re-assembling the members; arms were stiff, though near at hand, legs had travelled further from control, but feet were far away in a cold and distant land. A queer lightness in the knees enhanced the weight of the feet, making the leg a lever too fragile to bear such a load at its extremity. A waking man was a slack-stringed fiddle, to be tuned up peg by peg into the full tension of self-command.

There was always something to be done, involving a movement and a standing about. Digging, filling sandbags, building, carrying stores and ammunition, repairing the walls damaged by shell fire, scheming against the insidious attack of water, strengthening the barbed wire, resetting duckboards; an officer did none of these things with his own hands, or but rarely. He was there when such things were done, and being there demanded a presence of body and of mind. These tasks, in our early days, seemed to be of such importance that their supervision became an occupation capable of absorbing one’s entire stock of energy. They filled the mind so fully that a bombardment became a troublesome interruption of the serious business of life in the trenches.

Later, however, the redistribution of mud took the second place, for the men knew what to do; the zeal of the beginner faded into the semi-drudgery of the journeyman. Days and nights passed by in an oscillation between a suddenly roused fear of instant death and a slowly increasing dread of the continuance of this life of atrophy. An enemy we never saw— no, not an enemy, for maiming or extinction came from a bursting of iron in a ditch, the result of a mathematical computation made some miles away, tragically wrong to us, while the arithmetician knew not whether his answer were right.

Across No Man’s Land there were men sharing trouble with us, fighting the same losing battle against water, powerless before the sudden storm of bursting metal, and longing to be home again with their children. Were they an enemy? A scrap of song floating across at dusk, or a grey helmet seen for a moment through a periscope—were we to freeze into hatred at these manifestations of a life so like our own? An unrelieved weariness drugged us into a dullness of mind so overpowering that the brain declined a metaphysical battle on these issues. Everything was unreason, and it profited not to refine the ridiculous into the mad. On the other side of Aubers Ridge a German gunner twirled a few wheels into a new position, moved a bar of iron, and sent death soaring into the air; he went to his dinner. While he was moving his wheels and dials, three Londoners were filling sandbags in a ditch on the plain, arguing about Tottenham Hotspur. A flash, a noise, and a cloud of smoke.

‘Blast ‘em, they’ve killed old Parkinson— blown ‘is ‘ead off, they ‘aye, the bastards.’

Blast whom? The unseen German, going to his dinner? The man who sang, over the way? No. Blast everybody and everything; blast all who contributed to the sending of this quiet middle-aged Londoner to die combat between men, but in a struggle between two sets of mathematical equations. Did we think out this bitter problem, or discuss the ways of bringing an end to this distemper? No.. . we were too tired. Blast them, and back to the weary lifting of mud, this time passing a stretcher covered with a blanket hiding all but a thin trickle of blood. Four children, and his wife’s name was ‘Liz’ . . . must write to her to-night. . . . Oh, blast them!

While the mind was spinning slowly round a pivot of ‘How long?’ the muscles were carrying an aching frame back and fro along a wet and sour-smelling trench, finding each journey more difficult than the one before. How long must we wait for the relief? How long could one hope to live, after two months of daily escape? How long would it be before we could get leave? How long could this war last? This was the series of concentric circles of sentences passing through a deadened mind, each one repeated again and again, a new way of ‘counting sheep’, dulling the brain into a half-sleep. Four days in the line can be written down as a rapid fall along the slope of vitality into a stupor of weariness; on the path, some sharp crests of fear, but the end was overwhelming fatigue. Now that the war is half-forgotten, many men have described trench life, some with a wealth of remembered detail both of doing and of saying, rebuilding for the reader a day, a place and a people. Some clever writers have found in an early morning visit to the line material enough to furnish a vivid background for a long play of wit and character. But to most of us who served in the infantry, the thought of a trench brings back that long span of damnable tiredness, broken here and there by a sudden dry tongued spasm of fear. Cold nights, the discomfort of wet clothes, dragging minutes of anxiety on patrol, the sufferings of men ... these are all fading with the passing years, but nothing can efface the memory of that all-conquering fatigue.

The days were lengthening and February had filled the dykes to overflowing. There was a theory that the Germans, with the cunning of which they were the sole proprietors, had contrived to drain all the water from their trenches into ours. The men were convinced of its truth. It was easy enough to believe that Germany made no mistakes in any matter calling for the exercise of long-ranged scientific knowledge, and also to credit the enemy with a complete mastery over the material conditions of war. Wherever we had stood in a trench, the Germans were above us, looking down from some ridge upon our amateurish struggles on the plain. We had not seen the enemy’s trenches except through a periscope or a sniper’s peephole, but among the men it was accepted as inevitable that these trenches should be dry, and full of safe and comfortable dug-out. We lived in a world of our own mistakes, compelled by the unsuccess of our commanders, as we thought, to inhabit a sodden and water-logged plain, failing to make a dry trench or a comfortable dug-out. We knew the crashing terrors of the enemy’s ‘five-nines’, and the malignant punch of his ‘seven-sevens’, but we had not as yet been shelled by our own artillery, so we could not believe that our shell-fire equalled his in malevolence. Our guns might have been excellent weapons, but we were short of shells, and, one afternoon, a call for retaliation on the enemy’s trenches brought seventeen rounds of 4.5’s, of which fourteen failed to explode. For our comforting we were told that there was an unlimited supply of ammunition to fire if the enemy attacked us; if his infantry left their trenches to advance, our S.O.S. barrage would be impenetrable. Our day-to-day firing, however, was severely restricted. Standing up to the knees in water, half ashamed of the weakness of our gunfire, it was easy to convince oneself that on the other side of No Man’s Land dwelt a master of the craft of war, planning superhuman schemes for our destruction at the time of his choosing. Not that we thought the grey hatted infantrymen opposite to be one whit more able than ourselves to kill or to harass; the skill lay further back, in their commanders. Thus it came that hundreds of men believed that the water in our trenches was one of Germany’s many weapons, and when one of our engineers strongly denied this possibility, his listeners saw in this denial another demonstration of our inferiority—in intelligence.

This great question of drainage remained unsettled when we left this sector, moving south towards the La Bassée canal to take charge of a marsh in front of Festubert. On our right the ground ran up to Givenchy, an ill-famed hillock where the pulse of war quickened to a restless exchange of shell-fire and bombs. We were quiet enough in Festubert. Water had triumphed over man, and there was no front line to hold. The greater part of the battalion lived in a well-made breastwork some hundreds of yards away from the enemy, but my company held the Islands, a series of isolated posts in the marsh. Small groups of men spent the day lying down quietly in a short stretch of trench, with nothing whatever to do but to look through a periscope. There were no communication trenches leading up to these posts, and by day they were unapproachable from the rear or from their neighbours. There were frequent reliefs of the garrisons from the main body of the company, scattered about in bricked-up dug-outs made out of the ruins of the village. Visiting these posts at night was an eerie business, walking boldly above ground, across ditches and through the remains of barbed wire, past long-unburied corpses, up to the island posts. The wire in front was bad, and the loss of direction on a dark night carried a risk of stumbling into the German lines. A hard frost set in, and a heavy fall of snow added greatly to our troubles, making life a mere struggle to keep warm. At night we lit fires in braziers, but by day the smoke would draw shell-fire upon our dug-outs, so we had to school ourselves to bear the ache of cold in inactivity, discovering in the process several new forms of stiffness. Our numbers were declining steadily with each visit to the line. On parade the company had shrunk to one half its original size, although we could not recall to memory any one day of large loss; the tree was shedding its leaves in its early autumn, and ever before us was the prospect of the gale of a battle that would strip us bare. The growing pressure of day added to day had made inelastic creatures of us all, incapable of reaction against good fortune or bad, dragging one foot after another upon the slow-moving treadmill of this weary life, torpid minds in unresponsive bodies. There was nothing new to talk about, one day was like another.

At last something happened to rouse us a little. We heard that a platoon of Bantams was coming to us to serve an apprenticeship in the line. Were we already old enough in the ways of war to teach others? It was not difficult to persuade ourselves that we were veterans, for years seemed to have passed by since we ‘came out of our time’ with the Guards. A whole platoon of fresh men to help us in carrying and in digging was a great reinforcement. The Bantams were small, but very sturdy and self-possessed; on parade they seemed to be all equipment, and on the march, walking bundles of gear. The Londoners gave them a great welcome, and I heard many a traveller’s tale being told to the newcomers. This I overheard in a dug-out in Festubert.

‘I tell you what, kid, the shells ain’t so bad, nor the bullets ain’t, nor the blarsted fatigues. It’s the bleedin’ rats as does it. When you’re standin’ on guard at night they runs abaht on the parapet and lashes out at yer with their bleedin’ ‘md legs and if you ain’t careful they knocks yer off the bleedin’ fire-step back inter the trench.’
‘And it ain’t only that,’ said another. ‘Look what they did to Sergeant Tracy. Now ‘e was farst asleep in a dug-out, ‘e was, and when ‘e woke up, blowed if a rat ‘adn’t bitten off ‘alf ‘is blinkin’ ear.’
‘‘Ave yer seen the Cap’n’s mackintosh?’ asked a third. ‘Just you look at the collar when ‘e comes round to-night. You’ll find one ‘alf of it all gone, all chewed away by a rat when ‘e was sleepin’. Big fat things they are, big as dogs, and fat as ‘eli.’

The very first night the Bantams accompanied us to the line, the Germans opposite called out ‘Cock-a-doodle-do’ many times. There was no mistaking it: they knew perfectly well that the Bantams were with us. We on our part, in the infantry, did not know whether a Bavarian or a Saxon stood against us, so that this display of knowledge brought to us all an uneasy feeling that every movement we made was put down in some enormous note-book on the other side. Here was clear proof that the German High Command was omniscient, and there was a large increase in the supporters of the theory that their infinite cunning enabled the Germans to drain all their water into our trenches.

Four days of this hard weather were a severe trial of our powers of resistance. Hands and feet were sore when we set out on our trudge along the road to Gorre, the pack seemed heavier than usual, and the rifle made of lead. We started stiffly in small parties at five minute intervals, the Sergeant-Major and I walking at the rear of the last section. Traffic had turned the snow into slush, and men were staggering uneasily on the slippery road, sometimes falling into the drifts at the side, everybody silent, tired and sleepy. On along this never-ending lane, following a dark ribbon of trodden snow, bearing occasionally into the ditch to let pass by a limber wagon taking up supplies, regaining the crown of the road with increasing difficulty, and halting awhile to rest. At every halt it grew harder to restart this toiling train of men. The Bantams were suffering severely, for their feet were not inured to the soaking, and their packs, equipment and rifles weighed nearly as much as themselves. The Sergeant-Major and I ended by driving these weary men like sheep, with curses and pushes, carrying several rifles, dragging back on to his feet every man who dropped down, allowing no one, upon any pretext, to rest. Cruel work, but kinder than letting men of low vitality drop into an endless sleep. Three hours after the first section of the company reached Gorre we brought in this tail of stupefied stragglers, pushed them into a barn and gave them a tot of rum; they were half asleep as they took off their equipment and dropped into the straw. I drank half a cupful of rum and began to nibble at a biscuit, but I was too sleepy to finish it.