nce officer to the C.R.A. in order to join a battery, and
had now gone home with his third wound since Zillebeke. "You remember
how he came back in time for the August advance and got hit immediately
and wouldn't let them send him back to England--you know we loaned him
to the --rd Brigade because they were short of officers. Well, he
rolled up again about ten days ago, and got hit again in the Le Cateau
attack. Major 'Pat' told me he was wonderful.... Lay in a shell-hole
with his leg smashed--they poured blood out of his boots--and commanded
his battery from there, blowing his whistle and all that, until they
made him let himself be taken away." The colonel, who listened and at
the same time wrote letters, said that the thing that pleased him most
during the last few days was the patriotic instinct of some cows. When
the Hun evacuated Le Cateau he took away with him all the able-bodied
Frenchmen and all the cows. But his retreat became so rapid and so
confused, that numbers of the men escaped. So did the cows: for three
days they were dribbling back to their homesteads and pasturages.

All through the night the enemy shelled Bousies. He planted only two
near us, but a splinter made a hole in the roof of the big barn and
caught a mule on the shoulder.

The doctor came up from the waggon line next morning and accompanied me
on a tour of the batteries. "If you follow the yellow wire you'll come
to B Battery," said Wilde. "They are in the corner of a meadow. A
Battery are not far away, across the stream." It was a golden autumn
day, and our feet rustled through the fallen yellow leaves that
carpeted a narrow lane bowered by high, luxuriant, winding hedges.
"Why, this place must be a paradise in peace times," said the doctor,
entranced by the sweet tranquillity of the spot. "It's like a lover's
walk you see in pictures." We strode over fallen trees and followed the
telephone wire across a strip of rich green. B Battery's guns were
tucked beneath some stubby full-leaved trees that would hide them from
the keenest-eyed aerial observer. "No sick, doctor," called Bob
Pottinger from underneath the trench-cover roof of his three-foot hole
in the ground. "We're improving the position and have no time to be
ill." The doctor and I crossed a sticky water-logged field, and passed
over the plank-bridge that spanned the slow vagrant stream. A battery
had their mess in one of the low creeper-clad cottages lining the road.
Their guns wer