ad come to the doorway.

The brigadier paid us another visit late that night. He was almost
boyish in his glee. "A perfect little show," he told the colonel. "Your
forward guns did very fine work indeed. And the 6-inch hows. gave the
wood an awful pasting. From the reports that have come in we only took
seven Boche prisoners; practically all the rest were killed."

So we took our rest that night, content in the knowledge that things
were going well. There being only four beds, one of us would have to
doss down on the floor. The colonel insisted on coming into our "odd
man out" gamble. The bare boards fell to me; but I slept well. The
canvas bag containing my spare socks fitted perfectly into the hollow
of my hip--the chief recipe for securing comfort on hard ground.

_Reveille_ was provided by the bursting of an 8-inch shell on the other
side of the road. It removed part of the roof of our hut, and smothered
the rest with a ponderous shower of earth. We shaved and washed by the
roadside, and Major Mallaby-Kelby contrived a rapid and complete change
of underclothing, also in the open air.

By 8.30 A.M. the colonel, Major Mallaby-Kelby, and the battery
commanders were walking briskly through the valley and on to the
rolling country beyond, reconnoitring for positions to which the
batteries would move in the afternoon. Wilde and myself accompanied
them, and as Judd and Bob Pottinger were also of the party I heard more
details of what B Battery's forward section had done the evening
before.

"I saw you turn into the valley at the trot," I said to Judd.

"Yes, by Gad," he replied; "and when we got into the valley we made it
a canter. Those dead horses will show you what the valley has been
like."

We were striding through the valley now--a death-trap passage, two
hundred yards across at its widest point, and less than three-quarters
of a mile long. I counted twenty-seven dead horses, lying in grotesque
attitudes, some of them cruelly mangled. The narrow-gauge railway had
become scattered bits of scrap-iron, the ground a churned waste of
shell-holes.

"And the worst of it was that the traces of the second team broke,"
Pottinger chimed in. "Judd had gone on ahead, and we hadn't any spare
traces. So I sent that team back out of the way, followed the first
gun, and brought the team back to take up the second gun. Damned good
team that, E sub-section. You remember the team we were training for
the 'Alarm Race' when we w