They entrained at dawn, loading and lashing vehicles, coaxing horses into trucks, shepherding men, supervising equipment; slid off to the south; travelled endlessly through endless fields, past endless villages; till after three days they made Amiens. “Now we shan’t be long,” said Gunner Mucksweat, as the last waggon came, groaning to ground, the last team backed into the swingle-trees. “Dinna believe it, Muckie, we’ll no go into action yet,” warned his “Number Two.” And Mucksweat’s “Number Two,” the canny Macnab, proved right. Back they marched, and back; through the broad tree-girt avenues of Amiens, where French munitionettes whirling homewards on rickety motor-lorries kissed greetings; over a vast canal below whose embankment silent _poilus_, blue-cloaked and blue-helmeted, sat glued to enormous fishing-rods; back, along the white and dusty road, to Hangest. . . . “Told you we’d put you through it, P.J.,” chaffed Pettigrew late that night as—waggons unlimbered, horses tethered, men bivouacked at last—they flung themselves to bed in the lath-and-plaster room of a midden-courted farm. “Dunno what’s the matter with me,” groused Peter. “Little Willie isn’t used to being anywhere except at the head of the column. He’s been pulling my arms out all this evening. Given me a stitch or something”—he coughed acridly in the darkness—“wonder how long we shall stop here?” “Oh, about a week, I expect. . . . Good-night,” snored his companion. § 6 It took three days to concentrate the four brigades of Southdown Artillery at Hangest. Concentration concluded, there followed a period of desultory “training”—taken with immense and harassing seriousness by Lt.-Colonel Revelsworth, a dapper arrogant-looking man of forty-five, very different from the Weasel; slightly less seriously by his subordinates. Fortunately, the Anglo-Saxon is not imaginative. Neither officers nor men of “Beer” Battery bothered as they went about their lawful (or unlawful) business, to consider the near future. To be out of action, away from the sound of guns, sufficed them. Thus they waited—five days—six days—a week and a week-end; till there came, one warm summer’s evening while they sat at poker, a very _affairé_ Purves, second star newly on his sleeve, with orders that, “The Colonel would like to see all available officers at Headquarters immediately.” “Confound it,” said Lodden. “I’ve never been in such amazing luck.” “Never bring messages like that yourself,” whispered Peter to Purves as they strolled across the cobbled courtyard to Headquarters. “What’s it all about?” “Only a pi-jaw. We’re going into action tomorrow.” And a “pi-jaw,” as Purves irreverently described it, they got.