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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.
I want always to remember Bousies, the village of gardens and hedgerows and autumn tints where we saw the war out, and lay under shell fire for the last time; whence we fought our final battle on November 4th, when young Hearn of A Battery was killed by machine-gun bullets at 70 yards' range, and Major Bullivant, with a smashed arm and a crippled thigh, huddled under a wall until Dumble found him the concluding fight that brought me a strange war trophy in a golfing-iron found in a hamlet that the Boche had sprawled upon for four full years.... And the name punched on the iron was that of an Oxford Street firm.
When we went, General Rawlinson, genuinely sorry to lose us from his Army, expressed his appreciation of our services during the past three months, in a farewell letter, copies of which were given to all ranks. Soon after our transfer, we moved to the Landrecies area, and went into billets in the dirty little town of Bousies.
The villages we went through had escaped obliterating shell fire. I learned that our attacks had been planned thus-wise. Near a bleak cross-roads I saw Collinge of B Battery, and got off the lorry to talk to him. "Brigade Headquarters are at Bousies, about six miles from here," he said. "I'm going that way. The batteries are all in Bousies." "What sort of a time have you had?" I inquired.
Concert parties became more numerous, and, in addition to the "Whizzbangs," who worked very hard, the Brigade had a show of their own, known as the "138's." While at Bousies we marched one Sunday to Landrecies, where H.M. the King paid a visit. It was an informal affair, no guard of honour and no lining the road, and none of us will ever forget the scene.
Collinge and I rode into Bousies in the wan light of an October afternoon. At a cross-roads that the Boche had blown up "They didn't do it well enough; the guns got round by that side track, and we were only held up ten minutes," said Collinge Brigade Headquarters' sign-board had been planted in a hedge.
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