t was back--Beadle and myself were the only two officers in the
Brigade who had gone through the March retreat and not yet been on
leave to England; but I was keen on another trip forward with the
colonel, and on the morning of the 4th Wilde and I joined him on a
prospecting ride, looking for new positions for the batteries.

It was a journey that quickened all one's powers of observation. We
went forward a full five miles, over yellow churned wastes that four
days before had been crowded battlefields; past shell-pocked stretches
that had been made so by our own guns. At first we trotted along a
straight road that a short time before had been seamed with Boche
trenches and barbed wire. The colonel's mare was fresh and ready to shy
at heaps of stones and puddles. "She's got plenty of spirit still,"
said the colonel, "but she's not the mare she was before the hit in the
neck at Commenchon. However, I know her limitations, and she's all
right providing I spare her going uphill."

Just outside the half-mile long village of Ronssoy he pointed to a
clump of broken bricks and shattered beams. "That's the farm that D
Battery insisted was Gillemont Farm, when we were at Cliffe Post on
September 19," he explained. "The day I was with him at the 'O.P.,'
Wood couldn't understand why he was unable to see his shells fall. He
telephoned to the battery to check the range they were firing at, and
then decided that the map was wrong. When I told him to examine his map
more closely he spotted the 140 contour between this place and
Gillemont Farm. It made Gillemont Farm invisible from the 'O.P.' Of
course Gillemont Farm is 2000 yards beyond this place."

We reached a battered cross-roads 1200 yards due south of Duncan Post,
that cockpit of the bitter hand-to-hand fighting of Sept. 19th and
20th. A couple of captured Boche 4.2's--the dreaded high-velocity
gun--stood tucked behind a low grassless bank, their curved, muddy,
camouflaged shields blending with the brown desolation of the
landscape. Two American soldiers saluted the colonel gravely--lean,
tanned, straight-eyed young fellows. For the first time I noticed that
the Americans were wearing puttees like our men, instead of the canvas
gaiters which they sported when first in France. Their tin hats and
box-respirators have always been the same make as ours.

The colonel stopped to look at his map. "We'll turn north-east here and
cross the canal at Bony," he said. We rode round newly-d