Now the ditches in this part of Flanders are anything from about three to six feet deep, and their sides are cut down as straight and smooth as a wall; in winter they are full to the brim with ice-cold water, and their bottom is an unplumbed depth of mud of the consistency of molasses and the tenacity of fish glue. From all of which you will understand and appreciate the difficulty of rescuing the trapped wagon and horse, although you will never, unless you have experienced it, understand the wetness, the cold, the exasperating stupidity of the horse, the monumental bulk and weight and the passive resistance of a wet and mud-plastered wagon, the bitter unpleasantness of the whole job. Actually, although this may appear surprising, the salving of the horse was a greater difficulty than the restoration of the wagon to the road. The wagon had to be unloaded, it is true, but after that a plank pushed sloping down under the wheel, a swarm of men clustering and clutching on the wheels and tailing on a couple of drag-ropes, brought the concern out with a rush. Then the team was hooked in again and the wagon rolled off, and with a chorus of cries, of scuffling hoofs, of grinding wheels, the column halted behind the stalled wagons came to life and rumbled on their way. The horse made a longer and more temper-raising job. Driver Jim Ruff, of the A.S.C., had always had an inordinate pride in his wheelers, a liking for them that in connection with a human would have been called love, a belief in their intelligence that was beyond doubt. But that night his pride had a muddy fall, his love a cooling off into annoyance, his belief a staggering blow. ‘Golly,’ the ditched near-wheeler, displayed a stupidity that, as Driver Ruff assured her, would have disgraced ‘a mongrel mule,’ an indifference to helping herself, and a calm resignation and acceptance of her fate that respectively, and again in the words of Driver Ruff, ‘was more like a oyster than a ’orse’ and ‘might do for a bloomin’ padre, but wasn’t no use in the A.S.C.’ Driver Ruff, at the first crash of catastrophe, had flung down off his perch and was round at his wheelers’ heads in a flash, unhooking ‘Wog,’ lying quietly on his side in the road and waiting for assistance and instructions, and adjuring the struggling ‘Golly’ to keep quiet an’ not make a fool of herself. ‘Golly’ took the advice so completely that, having quietened, she refused—although the mud clamped about her legs may have had something to do with it—to move a limb thereafter. At first Ruff and the other drivers called to assist tried to persuade her to get her fore-feet on the bank, then by passing a drag-rope round her fore-legs tried to pull them from under her and up on to firm ground. The only result was to upset her balance and set her slowly sinking sideways until her body was completely covered and only her neck and head were above water. It began to look as if the horse must drown in a four- or five-foot ditch.