Behind the darkness I can hear the drivers lifting up the feet of their horses and feeling for stones. Good boys, these drivers! They love their beasts and speak to them as pals. There’s so much discipline that one doesn’t get much time for loving in the army. I remember a march on this same road when the drivers were so frozen that they had to be lifted out of their saddles; no one had the strength to unfasten a bit till he had thawed his fingers between the horse’s back and the saddle-blanket. Yet there wasn’t one man who quit when we limped into our muddy standings. Every gunner and driver went to work on the horses, grooming them with a will and trying to make them comfortable before he thought of himself—and this, not because it was ordered, but because he realised through his own misery the forlornness of his four-footed comrades. Good boys, all of them! I think the Lord of Compassion, when the final reckoning comes, will remember kindnesses even to horses. When he judges those drivers, he’ll not forget the bitter cold of that winter’s march and what it meant to stand grooming in the snow and sleet when you were bitten to the bone and almost crying with misery. So he’ll pass over their swearing and the times when they got drunk, and he’ll say, pointing to the horses who will also be in Heaven, “inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye did it unto me.” If that should happen, the drivers will be most awfully surprised, because according to their standards they only did their duty. Some of the chaps in my section, which is the leading and senior section of the battery, try to ask me questions as I pass. “Are we going far, sir?” “Are we going out for training?” “Do you think, sir, that it’s the Big Push at last?” I cannot see their faces, but I recognise them by their voices. They are drawn from every class of society. Some of them were college boys, some were mechanics, some day-laborers, some adventurers, some came out of gaol to join. Now only one quality lifts one man above another—his courage. Their questions are asked from all kinds of motives—friendliness, curiosity, nervousness. I am conscious of an atmosphere of tension throughout the battery. It seems a shame that, they should be told nothing. In no other game in the world would you march men to their death, without so much as warning them that it was to their death that they were going. From one of my questioners—a man who was wounded eight months ago and has just re joined us—I pick up a significant piece of information.