ds away, and in a minute or
two Mac followed with another comb. The fellows greeted us with
exclamations of delight and surprise; many of us had been two years in
the battle line without ever having seen, let alone tasted, such a
delicious morsel. Every man in the billet fell to, munching the honey
with expressions of sheer joy; every fellow in the bunch had his face
and hands littered with the sticky joy like so many kids munching taffy.
In the midst of our feasting, visitors called; the robbed bees came
flying into the room after their treasure. McLean, by this time, had
been stung about twenty times, and I had about a dozen nips on my hands
and face, and in the very heat of our argument with our visitors, "Stand
to!" was sounded, and honey, bees and everything else was dropped as we
raced for the guns. But the bees did not drop us; they chased us every
bit of the way; they attacked our hands, our mouths, our
necks,--wherever there was a particle of our anatomy exposed we were
stung.

On our way to the guns McLean brought a comb with him, leaving the other
alongside his bed. We had to pass the Major on our way, whose dugout was
close to the hives, and by that time he had an inkling of what was
going on and he yelled, "Grant, throw that honey down; you too, McLean."
As he yelled his orders I was passing the telephonist's hut and I threw
it in to him,--"Here, Graham, here's some honey for you, it's great,"
and continued my run down to the guns, the bees still following us up.

McLean laid his comb on a pile of shells beside the gun, and the heat of
the August day caused the honey to trickle over the shells. I commenced
pointing the gun while Mac worked the range drum; the angles were passed
to us and inside of a minute we were firing, and inside of another
minute we had the sternest kind of a battle on our hands, for thicker
than ever the bees came swarming around the gun.

"Who in hell broke into those hives?" yelled the Major.

No reply; we were busily working and "hadn't time" to answer. The honey
on our hands, coupled with the dust, made a grit that in opening and
closing the breech caused the mechanism to stick, and the honey clinging
to the shells caused the breech chamber to stick, making the shell cases
jam in the gun after being discharged, forcing us to pry open with a
sharp pick the breech each time to extract the empty cartridge. All
during the operation the Major was cursing like a madman at the men,
wh