colonel dipped his hand for the fifth time into the box
of canteen chocolates that Manning had placed on the table with the
port. "That's a nice Sam Browne of yours," he observed, noticing the
gloss on our adjutant's belt.

"I hope you don't take a fancy to it, sir," replied our adjutant
quickly. "We're all afraid of you, you know. I've put a double piquet
on our waggon lines for fear some of your fellows take a liking to our
horses."

The Australian colonel and his adjutant laughed good-naturedly, and the
colonel told us a story of a captain and a sergeant-major in another
Australian brigade who were accomplished "looters."

One night the pair were hauling down a tent which they thought was
empty, when a yell made them aware that an officer was sleeping in it.
The captain took to his heels, but the sergeant-major was captured.

"The next day," concluded the Australian colonel, "the captain had to
go and make all sorts of apologies to get his sergeant-major off. The
other people agreed, provided the officer ransomed him with half a
dozen pit-props and ten sheets of corrugated iron. For a long time
afterwards we used to chaff the captain, and tell him that he valued
his sergeant-major at six pit-props and ten sheets of iron."

Hot sweltering days followed. Most mornings I spent at the O.P.
watching our batteries' efforts to knock out suspected enemy trench
mortars, or staring through my binoculars trying to pick out Boche
transport, or fresh digging operations. The tramp back at midday along
the communication trenches was boiling-hot going. I used to think
"People working in London will be pining just now for green fields and
country air. For myself, I'd give anything for a cool ride on a London
bus." In the afternoons there were reserve battery positions--in case
of a swift Hun advance--to be reconnoitred, gaps in the barbed-wire
systems to be located, and bits of trenches that would have to be
filled in to allow our waggons to cross. Divisional Artillery were
insistent upon timed reports of hostile shelling, particularly gas
shelling, and this formed another portion of my special work. One day
intimation came from Division that Fentiman and Robson had been
accepted for the Air Service. "It's the only way to get leave to
England," said Robson jocularly. Fentiman's chief regret was that he
would have to leave behind a mare that he had got from the Tank Corps.
"She pulls so," he told me one afternoon when I met him