When we moved to France Rattle-Snake Pete came with us. I think the doctor saw it would have broken his heart not to come, although at his age he certainly should not have done so. But come he did, and never will the writer forget the day Rattle pursued him into an old loft, up a broken, almost perpendicular ladder, to inquire in a voice of thunder why a certain fatigue party was minus a man. “Come you down out of there, lad, or you’ll be for it!” And, meekly as a sucking-dove, I came! He was wounded at the second battle of Ypres, and, according to all accounts, what he said about the Germans as he lay on that battle-field petrified the wounded around him, and was audible above the roar of bursting Jack Johnsons. They sent him to hospital in “Blighty,” an unwilling patient, and there he has been eating out his heart ever since, in the face of adamantine medical boards. One little incident. We were billeted in an old theatre, years ago it seems now, at Armentières. We had marched many kilometres in soaking rain that afternoon, and we were deadly weary. Rattle, though he said no word, was ill, suffering agonies from rheumatism. One could see it. Being on guard, I was able to see more than the rest, who, for the most part, slept the sleep of the tired out. One fellow was quite ill, and he tossed and turned a good deal in his sleep. Rattle was awake too, sitting in front of the dying embers in the stove, his face every now and then contorted with pain. Often he would go over to the sick man and arrange his bed for him as gently as a woman. Then he himself lay down. The sick man awoke, and I heard his teeth chatter. “Cold, lad?” said a deep voice near by. “Yes, bitter cold.” The old S.-M. got up, took his own blanket and put it over the sick man. Thereafter he sat until the dawn broke on a rickety chair in front of the dead fire. MULES Until there was a war, quite a lot of people hardly knew there were such things as mules. “Mules?” they would say, “Oh, er, yes ... those creatures with donkey’s ears, made like a horse? or do you mean canaries?” _Nous avons changé tout cela!_ “Gonga Din” holds no hidden meaning from us now. We have, indeed, a respect for mules, graded according to closeness of contact. In some Transports they think more of a mule than of a first-class, No. 1 charger. Why? Simply because a mule is--a mule. No one has yet written a theory of the evolution of mules. We all know a mule is a blend of horse and donkey, and that reproduction of the species is mercifully withheld by the grace of heaven, but further than that we do not go. When the war began our C.O. was talking about mules. We had not crossed the water then. He said: “I will _not_ have any mules. No civilised man should have to look after a mule. When I was in Pindi once, a mule ... Mr. Jenks”--our worthy Transport Officer--“there will be no mules in this regiment.” That settled it for a while.