Our next delivery of rations was well within range of the German gunners, who had pretty well knocked the place to pieces; there were shell craters all around. We halted at a farmhouse for the night, and the following morning a shell carried away the roof of our improvised cook-house. Nobody, however, was injured. It is really amazing what good luck follows some of our men; they seem to have charmed lives. Three of the gunners while at —— were sitting in a garden, where the guns had been placed; a few yards divided them. They were chatting, seated on ration boxes, and a little peasant girl was amusing herself standing behind them, tickling the ear of one of the gunners with a straw. A shell burst directly in front of one of the guns. Two of the gunners were killed outright, the little girl was very severely injured, and the third gunner was simply knocked over by the force of the explosion, but absolutely untouched. The same man, on another occasion, was with the Commanding Officer of the battery, looking for suitable positions for guns, when a shell burst quite near them. Seeing an old French dug-out, the Major dived in and the gunner did so simultaneously. The result was a jamb, neither being able to get right in. The Major asked him where the devil he was going to. "Same place as you, sir," was his quiet retort. On another occasion an R.H.A. gun was knocked out by a direct hit. Parts of one of its wheels were found almost a hundred yards away from the gun, and pieces of it were scattered everywhere, yet an officer who was sleeping on the ground only ten yards from the gun was untouched. Towards the end of August 1915 the rumour "Batteries on the move again" came through, generally from the battery cook-house, where all matters, military and otherwise, are discussed. The 1st of September found us on the road again, this time to Corbie, near to which town the batteries had taken up their position on the Somme. To reach the wagon lines, where rations were dumped, it was necessary to travel along a road under enemy observation, along the Somme Valley, a beautiful part of the country. At that time we saw the French troops leaving this part of the line to make room for our men. The Saxon regiments were in the trenches just across the valley, their line being visible on the side of a hill. A distance of three hundred yards has to be maintained between each lorry on such roads, it being possible to only use this road after dark; no lamps were allowed on the lorries. This, of course, made driving exceedingly difficult, especially on one occasion when it happened to be a particularly dark night and a lot of horse transport was on the road. One could only judge the centre of it by the camber and listen for the jangle of chains, the only means of knowing when we near the horse wagons. That night a thunderstorm raged nearly the whole of the way to the batteries, the flashes lighting up the road at intervals and making matters even worse.