We dragged the cart along the heavy roads, but it was such hard going that we saw that we should be forced to get a horse from somewhere; so we looked around at the first farm we came to—and a sorry place it was, with everything in confusion, and the animals about suffering terribly and starving—and there we found a horse of the largest size.
With great difficulty we got together bits of harness, string and rope, and tied the horse in the shafts with the ropes for traces, and when we had finished we did not know whether we had harnessed the horse or tied the cart on to it. Anyway, we got along very well after that.
The cart had amongst its wounded an infantry officer who had been saved by one of our fellows, though the officer belonged to another regiment. He had got entangled in some barbed wire, and, as he had been wounded in the leg, he could not move either one way or the other. He was absolutely helpless, and under a heavy fire.
Our fellow went out and got to the helpless officer, and, by sticking at it and doing all he could, being himself pretty badly cut in the operation, he freed the officer from the entanglement, and carried him safely up to the cart. We were getting on very nicely with our little contrivance when we ran into the 2nd Dragoons, but we soon left them behind us, and found ourselves amongst some of our own transport. We joined up with it, adding another and a very strange waggon to the column, and on we went until we reached a large town and halted.
During the whole of this time I had been carrying a canteen which had belonged to a Frenchman. It was quite a big canteen, and I kept it filled with apples, of which we got an enormous number, and on which at times we had practically to live for two or three days together.
We had reached a stage of fighting when we had to make continuous short rushes against the Germans, under hails of shrapnel. In making these rushes it often happened that we sheltered behind a little sort of earthwork which we threw up. We just made a bit of head cover and lay behind that; but sometimes this head cover could not be made, and that was where I scored with my Frenchman’s canteen.
During one of our rushes shrapnel burst right over my head, and one fellow said to me, “I wouldn’t carry that thing, George, if I were you.” But, having kept it for so long, I was not going to throw it away.
Away we went. I was carrying the canteen in my left hand, and my rifle in the right; but I changed them over, and I had no sooner done that than crash came a shell, and, in bursting, a fragment hit the canteen, and took a great piece out of it. I should have been badly wounded myself, but I had filled the canteen with earth, and so it had protected me and acted as a first-rate cover. The man who was on my right received a nasty wound.
After this we had to advance over open country, where there was not so much as a blade of grass for cover. We went on till we reached a ditch, which was full of water. Some of us had to wade through it, but others, by going farther back, were able to cross a tiny footbridge—one of those narrow planks which only allow one man at a time to cross. The Germans had a machine-gun trained at this little bridge so we lost no time in getting off it. It was here that our captain was mortally wounded by a shot, and we had other casualties in crossing the bridge.
From this point we had to climb to the top of a hill, which was so steep that we had to dig our fixed bayonets into the ground to help us up. There was a wood at the top of the hill, and there we took shelter; but we had no sooner got amongst the trees than the shrapnel was on us again, causing many casualties.