For about a mile, under a constant and furious fire, I dashed on; then I got to the wall, and instantly I drew in as many of the bolting horses as I could lay hands on. It all happened so swiftly that it is not easy to tell how this was done; but I know that I was safely mounted on my own horse when the stampede began, and that I dashed at the bolting animals and grabbed as many as I could, and that I hurried them to the shelter of the wall, and I fancy that they were just about as glad of the protection as I was. The gallop was a mad affair, and very likely it would never have ended as it did if all the shells the Germans fired had burst; but some of them did not explode, though I did not know of this till later, when I picked some of them up from the ground. While I was in the thick of this exciting business Farrier-Sergeant Scott was rushing about and securing other runaway teams, and he did so well and his work was considered so brilliant and important that the French gave him the decoration of the Legion of Honour. For the best part of an hour I was under cover of the wall, doing the best I could with the horses, and it was a funny old job to keep them anything like quiet with such a heavy fire going on all the time; yet so complete was the protection that practically no damage was done, the worst that occurred being the shattering of a pair of wheels by a bursting shell. By the end of the hour both myself and the horses were pretty well settling down; then things calmed down a bit. The Germans appeared to be tired of pounding at us, and perhaps they thought that they had blown us to pieces. At any rate we began to get out of it, and we had no sooner started to do that than the firing instantly re-opened. There was a village not far away and we made a dash for it; but we were forced to clear out, for the enemy’s artillery set the little place on fire and all the stacks and buildings were in flames. There was a good deal of confusion and mixing up of all sorts of troops. I had lost touch with my own lot and was ordered by a captain to join another column for the night, and this I did. I joined the 2nd Brigade Ammunition Column and next day I was with my own battery again, thankful to have got safely through a very dangerous business. Next day we picked up another position, and had no sooner done that than information came that immense bodies of Germans were on the move in our direction. The outlook was serious, because we were in the open and there was nothing for it except a fight to the death. The Germans were expected along a certain road and we made ready to fire at what is practically point-blank range, using Fuses 0 and 2, so that at 500 and 1000 yards the masses of the enemy would have had the shells bursting amongst them.