u
river. We were the advance Brigade. The Engineers were supposed to put
bridges across for us; the material came up all right, but the pioneers
who were to do the work missed the way. The sapper officer who had
brought the material wanted to wait till the proper people arrived, but
the Boche was shelling and machine-gunning like mad, and the colonel
said that bridge-building must be got on with at once. The colonel was
great that day. Old Johns of D Battery kept buzzing along with
suggestions, but the colonel put his foot down, and said, 'It's the
sapper officer's work; let him do it.' And the bridges were really well
put up. All the guns got across safely, although C Battery had a team
knocked out."

I walked by Collinge's side through a village of sloping roofs,
single-storied red-brick houses, and mud-clogged streets. It was the
village which our two brigades of artillery occupied when the Armistice
was signed, where the King came to see us, and M. le Maire, in his
excitement, gave His Majesty that typically French, shall I say? clasp
of intimacy and brotherliness, a left-handed handshake.

"Curious thing happened on that rise," remarked Collinge when we were
in open country again. "The colonel and the adjutant were with an
infantry General and his Staff officers, reconnoitring. The General had
a little bitch something like a whippet. She downed a hare, and though
it brought them into view of the Boche, the General, the colonel, and
the others chased after them like mad. I believe the colonel won the
race--but the adjutant will tell you all about it."

Away on the left a lone tree acted as a landmark for a sunken road.
"Brigade tried to make a headquarters there," went on Collinge, "but a
signaller got knocked out, and the Boche began using the tree as a
datum point; so the colonel ordered a shift." Twenty rough wooden
crosses rose mournful and remote in a wide, moist mangel-field. "The
cavalry got it badly there," said Collinge. "A 4.2 gun turned on them
from close range, and did frightful execution." We were near to a
cross-road, marked balefully by a two-storied house, cut in half so
that the interior was opened to view like a doll's house, and by other
shell-mauled buildings. "The batteries came into action under that
bank," he continued, pointing his cane towards a valley riddled with
shell-holes. "That's where Dumble did so well. Came along with the
cavalry an hour and a half before any Horse Artillery batt