Gradually he began to remember what had happened, and he wondered vaguely how long he had lain unconscious. In front of him stretched the wood which he had seen before he started, hiding from his view not only the actual hill but the road which led to it. He knew that on foot, bruised and shaken as he was, he could never now arrive in time. He had failed, and must return.
Then, as he stood sadly watching Dignity's fast glazing eyes he heard the thunder of hundreds of galloping hoofs, and looked up quickly. Round the corner of the wood, in wild career, came, not a cavalry charge as he had half expected, but teams—gun teams and limbers—but no guns. The battery had got into action on the hill, but a lucky hostile shell, wide of its mark, had dropped into the wagon line and stampeded the horses. A few drivers still remained, striving in vain to pull up. They might as well have tried to stop an avalanche.
Tony watched them flash past him to the rear. Still dazed with his fall, it was some seconds before the truth burst upon him.
He knew those horses.
"My God!" he cried aloud, "it's my own battery that's up there!"
In a moment all thought of his obvious duty—to return and report—was banished from his mind. He forgot the staff and his connection with it. One idea, and one only, possessed him—somehow, anyhow, to get to the guns.
Dizzily he started off towards the hill. His progress was slow and laboured. His head throbbed as though there was a metal piston within beating time upon his brain. The hot sun caused the sweat to stream into his eyes. The ground was heavy, and his feet sank into it at every step. Twice he stopped to vomit.
At last he reached the road and followed the tracks of the gun-wheels up it until he came to the gap in the hedge through which the battery had evidently gone on its way into action. The slope was strewn with dead and dying horses: drivers were crushed beneath them; and an up-ended limber pointed its pole to the sky like the mast of a derelict ship. The ground was furrowed with the impress of many heavy wheels, and everywhere was ripped and scarred with the bullet marks of low-burst shrapnel. But ominously enough, amid all these signs of conflict no hostile fire seemed to come in his direction.
The hill rose sharply for a hundred yards or so, and then ran forward for some distance nearly flat. Tony therefore, crawling up, did not see the battery until he was quite close to it.
Panting, he stopped aghast and stared.