And so we come to the return journey, back again to the 4th Army Corps. I am glad to say my own especial pets, a very handsome pair of blacks in "A" Battery 310 Brigade, survived the bombs, and before long another battle and the beginning of the glorious end.
Indeed, had we but realised it at the time, the beginning had come, and we had participated in it, one of the only four British Divisions which had had the luck of that honour.
It was shortly after our return from Rheims that I left the 62nd Division for the 9th Army Corps, so I cannot speak from actual experience of the thrilling excitement and glorious successes which the Division achieved in the 2nd taking of Havrincourt, and in the other great battles which brought this long war to a triumphant conclusion. (I left just after the York and Lancasters made that thrilling bayonet charge in company with the King's Company of the Grenadier Guards on the heights near Mory.)
But the story of these culminating triumphs is told in the pages of this book, and it only remains for me to offer one or two remarks.
Three things, among others, seem to me to be especially worthy of note: the endurance of the personnel, the youth of the officers in command of batteries, the efficiency of the Territorial gunner and driver.
How often do we see the phrase, "The Infantry were withdrawn for a rest, the Artillery remaining, as usual, in the line covering the —th Division."
The periodical reliefs of Divisions hardly affected the gunner at all. It was a marvel to me how the various Divisional Artilleries managed to "stick it out." A day or two in the wagon lines now and then seemed all that was necessary to restore officers and men to full vigour and activity again. It was a triumph of endurance.
As the war progressed battery commanders became younger and younger. I remember once congratulating an officer on gaining command of a six-gun battery—he had just "put up" his crowns—and making some remark on his age, to be met with the retort, "I'm not so very young, Sir, I'm nearly 21."
I wonder what would have been thought of the prophet who, in 1913, had predicted that batteries would be commanded in the greatest of all wars by men of "nearly 21"!
I well remember, some years before the war, when the Territorial Force was first evolved, the utter scepticism expressed of the Territorial ever being able to be made into a gunner. Infantry yes, but gunners—! And a distinguished Colonel Commandant R.A., of the old school, told me, during 1916, that Territorial Force gunners might be all right during trench warfare, but that it was absurd to think that Territorial Force drivers would ever be able to bring the guns into position in a war of movement. The advance of the batteries to Graincourt at the Battle of Cambrai, the changes of position on the Ardre, and 100 other instances prove the fallacy of such gloomy prognostications.