On my way back through the woods, shell-smashed, that covered the gentle hills through which the front line trenches ran, I saw a burial party.
I stopped a moment, and watched the laying to rest of all that was mortal of three troopers who had paid the great price.
Their comrades placed them reverently in the shallow graves in the soft earth of the hillside, marking each grave with a white wooden cross bearing each hero's name, his rank, and regiment.
Oh, those rows of rude wooden crosses! What thoughts their memory brings to mind! Gone now, many of them, ploughed under by long months of shell-fire, or trampled under foot by the ebb and flow of battle, as the lines have swept back and forth with the tide of war. Gone, perhaps, from the scarred and mangled hill-sides of Flanders; but never to go altogether from the hearts of those who knew them, and who realised their worth.
[CHAPTER III.]
On March 1st Captain "Babe" Nicholson, of the 15th Hussars, who had joined General de Lisle's staff in place of Captain Cecil Howard, 16th Lancers, promoted to General Allenby's staff at Cavalry Corps Headquarters, had to make a careful map of our trench position.
Captain Bennie Wheeler, 15th Hussars, in temporary charge of Divisional Signals, also had duties that took him to the trench line.
As neither Captain Nicholson nor Captain Wheeler had made the two-mile tramp across the fields and through the woods, I was instructed to act as guide. To skirt one edge of a field was safety of a comparative sort. To walk along its opposite edge meant dodging snipers' bullets in plenty. To turn from the road to a path through the scrub kept one out of sight of the Huns, while to proceed a dozen yards beyond the turning would expose one to a fair chance of being shot, at good range, by crack German marksmen.