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"Good man!" shouted Deighton of the Horse Battery through the mists. "Whar you raise dat tonga? I'm coming with you. Ow! But I've a head and half. I didn't sit out all night. They say the Battery's awful bad," and he hummed dolorously "Leave the what at the what's-its-name, Leave the flock without shelter, Leave the corpse uninterred, Leave the bride at the altar "My faith!
"At every turn, Morena's dusky height Sustains aloft the battery's iron load, And, far as mortal eye can compass sight, The mountain-howitzer, the broken road, The bristling palisade, the foss o'erflowed, The stationed band, the never-vacant watch, The magazine in rocky durance stand, The holster'd steed beneath the shed of thatch, The ball-piled pyramid, the ever-blazing match."
I put A Battery's rear position guns to fire on them by the map, and guessed that the Battery's forward guns would be hard at it already. The colonel came back from the Infantry Brigade, quiet and self-possessed as ever. "Defence in depth means forces more scattered, and greater difficulty in keeping up communication," he remarked, taking a chair and lighting a cigarette.
I had ridden about six hundred yards past the sunken road in which A Battery's ammunition waggons were waiting, when half a dozen 5·9's crashed round and about them. I turned back and saw more shells descend among the empty Nissen huts in Guillemont. Two drivers of A Battery were being carried away on stretchers and the waggons were coming towards me at a trot.
"Let's sit down and take a breather before we start back." "Okay. Douse the light?" "Might as well. Your battery's getting low." Scotty switched the light off and they sat down on the hard rock floor. Rick closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Plenty of hard work ahead. He might as well rest while he could. Scotty spoke suddenly. "Plenty of good fresh air down here. Isn't that a little odd?"
Out of the welter I saw young Bushman's horse on the pathway coming towards me. "C Battery's all right," he shouted to me, and a minute later I heard him explaining to the colonel. "C Battery's over now, sir. It has been touch-and-go. Some Horse Artillery in front had a waggon hit, and that caused a stoppage; and there were a lot of other waggons in front as well.
All along the front or rather both the fronts, for the German batteries worked on exactly the same system the batteries were pouring down their shells, and each battery was dependent for the accuracy of its fire on its own Observing Officer crouching somewhere up in front and overlooking his battery's 'zone.
The doctor and the acting signal officer came into the mess from their quarters farther along the quarry. "If this gas-shelling goes on, I guess we shall all have to have lessons in the deaf-and-dumb talk," puffed the doctor, pulling off his gas helmet. "Keep that door closed!" "D Battery's line gone, sir," rang up the sergeant-signaller. "M'Quillan and Black have gone out on it."
"Goodness!" murmured Monty Scruggs, with colorless lips, as the regiment came into line and moved forward to the battery's line of caissons at the bottom of the hill. "I'm so glad I didn't enlist in the artillery. I don't see how anybody up there can live a minute." "Yes, it looks like as if those artillery boys are earnin' their $13 a month about every second of their lives," remarked Shorty.
The refined joy of planting shells in the midst of the other battery's formation would appear a little thing when the infantry came swooping out of the woods. The face of a youthful rider, who was jerking his frantic horse with an abandon of temper he might display in a placid barnyard, was impressed deeply upon his mind. He knew that he looked upon a man who would presently be dead.
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