We had been heavily shelled on the way up, and while I was at battalion headquarters having a drink a message came to say that D Company limber had been hit by a shell. As I went to inspect the damage I passed the chaplain, who had come up with me from Frises bend, and a group of three or four men. He was gabbling the burial service over a dead man lying on the ground covered with a waterproof sheet. It was a suicide case. The misery of the weather and the knowledge of the impending attack had been too much for him. This was the last dead man I was to see in France, and like the first, a suicide. I found that the limber, which contained petrol tins of water for the company, had had a direct hit. There was no sign of the horses; they were highly prized horses, having won a prize at a divisional horse-show some months back for the best-matched pair of the division. So the transport sergeant and I sent the transport back and went looking for the horses in the dark. We stumbled through miles of morass that night but could not find them or get any news of them. We used to boast that our transport animals were the best in France. Our transport men were famous horse-thieves, and no less than eighteen of our stable had been stolen from other units at one time or another, for their good looks. There were even two which we had ‘borrowed’ from the Scots Greys. The horse I rode to the dentist came from the French police; its only fault was that it was the left-hand horse of the police squadron, and so had a tendency to pull to the wrong side of the road. We had never lost a horse to any other battalion, so naturally Sergeant Meredith and I, who had started out with the rations at about four o’clock in the afternoon, kept on with the search until long after midnight. When we reached Frises at about three o’clock in the morning I was completely exhausted. I collapsed on my bunk. The next day it was found that I had bronchitis and I went back in an ambulance to Rouen, once more to No. 8 Red Cross hospital. The major of the R.A.M.C. recognized me and said: ‘What on earth are _you_ doing out in France, young man? If I find you in my hospital again with those lungs of yours I’ll have you court-martialled.’ The quartermaster wrote to me there that the horses had been found shortly after I had gone; they were unhurt except for grazes on their bellies and were in the possession of the machine-gun company of the Fourth Division; the machine-gunners were found disguising them with stain and trying to remove the regimental marks. At Rouen I was asked to say where in England I would like to go to hospital. I said, at random, ‘Oxford.’ XXIII