He ran to one of these, who had swung round his limber and was now trying to calm the big horse he was sitting—the "near leader" of the team.
"What's going on?" the Lamp-post asked.
"They've broken through the 86th," the man told him; "came on without firing a shot—the beggars!" But the midshipman could get nothing more out of him.
"I don't know nothing more. Curse this darned horse! Keep still, can't you? My job's to get more of the stuff up to the guns. I don't know nothink. Chuck it, yer blighted fools! Ain't yer been long enough together? Cawn't yer smell who you've got next yer?"
The two horses were nosing each other, one trying to bite, and both fretting.
"They ain't worked together afore," he said, as the Lamp-post, who loved horses, separated their heads and rubbed their noses soothingly. "I 'ad to get a fresh 'off leader' this morning; the other was killed just t'other side of that 'ere ridge—shrapnel summat cruel there, all day—cawn't move a team but bang bursts a shrapnel—and they've been bursting shrapnel now, all along the road we've just come and have to go back by—curse them! This darned fool brute—chuck it, you blighter!"—as the horse he was sitting slyly bit the neck of the new "off leader", who sidled and trembled—"'e cawn't abide a stranger. 'Ere, stop that kicking! 'Old yer 'eads up, cawn't yer?"
He jerked the two horses apart as the two "wheelers" behind them began to plunge, and their driver to curse as he steadied them.
"'Struth! Ain't they fair cautions? Almost 'uman," growled the Lamp-post's friend.
Someone in the rear of the limber banged down the limber covers and shouted: "Right away, Bob!"
"Stand clear! Get up, you brutes!" and the drivers cracked their whips; but the wheels of the limber had stuck in the sand, and the four horses, excited and plunging, and not pulling together, could not move them.