The cook looked glum and said my rabbit was cooked to a turn. "Keep it for me until we get settled down again," I said. I posted a cycle orderly to wait at the spot we were leaving, so as to re-direct messengers arriving from Division or from the colonel; the brigade clerk asked to be allowed to stay behind until the three other orderlies returned from the batteries--he wouldn't feel justified in leaving before then, he assured me. It was 8.15 P.M. when our little procession headed by the sergeant-major passed through the village. I had sent my horses on, and it was on the point of darkness when I strode through the village, some way behind the column. A few officers of the Pioneer battalion that was moving out any moment stood at open doorways, and a group of drivers waited near the bridge ready to harness up their mules. Three aged women dressed in faded black, one of them carrying a bird-cage, had come out of a cottage and walked with feeble ungainly step towards the bridge. A couple of ancient men, pushing wheel-barrows piled high with household goods, followed. Out of the distance came the brooding whine of an approaching howitzer shell. A mighty rush of air, a blinding flash, and an appalling crash. An 8-inch had fallen in the middle of the street. A running to and fro; a heartrending, whimpering cry from one of the women; and groans and curses farther up the street. None of the poor terror-stricken old people were hurt, thank God! but three of the drivers had been hit and two mules killed outright. The men were quickly lifted into the shelter of the nearest house, and the civilian refugees took cover in a doorway just before the second shell tore a great rent in the village green on the other side of the bridge. Five shells fell in all, and an officer afterwards tried to persuade the old women to take a lift in a G.S. waggon that was about to start. But they refused to leave their men, who would not abandon the wheel-barrows. When I walked away the five were again beginning their slow hazardous pilgrimage to the next village.