It is difficult to convey just what that march meant. It lasted four days, once the blizzard being so thick and blinding that the march was abandoned, the whole brigade remaining in temporary billets. The pace was a crawl. The team horses slid into each other and fell, the leads bringing the centres down, at every twenty yards or so. The least rise had to be navigated by improvising means of foothold--scattering a near manure heap, getting gunners up with picks and shovels and hacking at the road surface, assisting the horses with drag-ropes--and all the time the wind was like a razor on one’s face, and the drivers up on the staggering horses beat their chests with both arms and changed over with the gunners when all feeling had gone from their limbs. Hour after hour one trekked through the blinding white, silent country, stamping up and down at the halts with an anxious eye on the teams, chewing bully beef and biscuits and thanking God for coffee piping hot out of a thermos in the middle of the day. Then on again in the afternoon while the light grew less and dropped finally to an inky grey and the wind grew colder,--hoping that the G.S. wagons, long since miles behind, would catch up. Hour after hour stiff in the saddle with icy hands and feet, one’s neck cricked to dodge the wind, or sliding off stiffly to walk and get some warmth into one’s aching limbs, the straps and weight of one’s equipment becoming more and more irksome and heavy with every step forward that slipped two back. To reach the destination at all was lucky. To get there by ten o’clock at night was a godsend, although watering the horses and feeding them in the darkness with frozen fingers that burned on straps and buckles drew strange Scotch oaths. For the men, shelter of sorts, something at least with a roof where a fire was lit at risk of burning the whole place down. For the officers sometimes a peasant’s bed, or valises spread on the floor, unpacking as little as possible for the early start on the morning, the servants cooking some sort of a meal, either on the peasant’s stove or over a fire of sticks.