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Sweat trickled over dust-begrimed countenances, feet were aching, the tongue clove parched to the mouth, the pack ... oh, the utter hell of it. And yet on the morrow you forgot! The Infantryman sees far more of the trenches than of Rest Camps, and therefore what precious days of absence from the joys of water-logged dug-outs comes his way are seized upon and lived to the very full.
"Just take these shears, won't you, and cut my toes off?" answered the inmate, an Indiana infantryman holding up a pair of dull shears in his hand, and elevating a foot for me to look at. I examined the latter carefully. All the flesh of the toes, except little pads at the ends, had rotted off, leaving the bones as clean as if scraped.
This kind of alpine-climbing-cum-fighting was as different from the fighting on the desert as it could well be, and only the infantryman, who did most of it, could tell you which he detested the more. As one of them said, in the Judæan hills you were mountaineer, pack-mule, and soldier all in one; and it is not for a mere helpless artilleryman to paint the lily.
We were not far from the enemy however, perhaps sixty paces. A ravine separated us, but it could not be seen. I went into the ranks, which were neither closed nor aligned, throwing up with my hand the soldiers' rifles to get them to cease firing and to advance. I was mounted, followed by a dozen orderlies. None of us were wounded, nor did I see an infantryman fall. Well then!
Our captors belonged to the Twenty-first Prussian Regiment and were, so far as we knew, the first of their kind we had been up against, all previous comers on our front having been Bavarians and latterly of the army group of Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria "Rupie," we called him. They wore the baggy grey clothes and clumsy looking leather top boots of the German infantryman.
When the artillery machine broke down, achievement of success demanded more initiative on the part of the Infantry than if no artillery had been used. In a sense our loss of a hundred guns at Cambrai a few weeks later became a blessing in disguise, for it restored the scales in favour of the Infantryman as the decisive agent on the field of battle. So ended the attack on Hill 35.
"Them's them awful kind o' rebels, ain't they the John Morgan kind that ride big horses that snort fire, and they have long swords, with which they chop men's heads off?" "A lot o' yellin', gallopin' riff-raff," said Shorty, with the usual contempt of an infantryman for cavalry. "Ain't worth the fodder their bosses eat." "Ain't they terribler than any other kind o' rebels?" asked Pete, anxiously.
"Oh well, if it's only his blooming ignorance " "That's just it, mate," smiled Doggie, "my blooming ignorance." "That's all right," said the nurse. "Now you're friends." "He had no right to call me an idjit," said the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantryman. He was an aggressive, red-visaged man with bristly black hair and stubbly black moustache.
If you want to get a real idea of what the British infantryman has to endure during at least six months of the year, I would suggest that you strap on a pack-basket with a load of forty-two pounds, which is the weight of the British field equipment, tramp for ten hours through a ploughed field after a heavy rain, jump in a canal, and, without removing your clothes or boots, spend the night on a manure-pile in a barnyard.
We saw a Yankee infantryman a short distance off, hurrying along with gun on shoulder. We called to him to surrender, and, as I rode to get his gun, another one following came in sight. When I confronted him and ordered him to throw down his gun, he promptly obeyed. The gun, a brand-new one, was loaded, showing a bright cap under the hammer.
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