Now the ditches in this part of Flanders are anything from about three to six feet deep, and their sides are cut down as straight and smooth as a wall; in winter they are full to the brim with ice-cold water, and their bottom is an unplumbed depth of mud of the consistency of molasses and the tenacity of fish glue. From all of which you will understand and appreciate the difficulty of rescuing the trapped wagon and horse, although you will never, unless you have experienced it, understand the wetness, the cold, the exasperating stupidity of the horse, the monumental bulk and weight and the passive resistance of a wet and mud-plastered wagon, the bitter unpleasantness of the whole job.
Actually, although this may appear surprising, the salving of the horse was a greater difficulty than the restoration of the wagon to the road. The wagon had to be unloaded, it is true, but after that a plank pushed sloping down under the wheel, a swarm of men clustering and clutching on the wheels and tailing on a couple of drag-ropes, brought the concern out with a rush. Then the team was hooked in again and the wagon rolled off, and with a chorus of cries, of scuffling hoofs, of grinding wheels, the column halted behind the stalled wagons came to life and rumbled on their way. The horse made a longer and more temper-raising job. Driver Jim Ruff, of the A.S.C., had always had an inordinate pride in his wheelers, a liking for them that in connection with a human would have been called love, a belief in their intelligence that was beyond doubt. But that night his pride had a muddy fall, his love a cooling off into annoyance, his belief a staggering blow. ‘Golly,’ the ditched near-wheeler, displayed a stupidity that, as Driver Ruff assured her, would have disgraced ‘a mongrel mule,’ an indifference to helping herself, and a calm resignation and acceptance of her fate that respectively, and again in the words of Driver Ruff, ‘was more like a oyster than a ’orse’ and ‘might do for a bloomin’ padre, but wasn’t no use in the A.S.C.’ Driver Ruff, at the first crash of catastrophe, had flung down off his perch and was round at his wheelers’ heads in a flash, unhooking ‘Wog,’ lying quietly on his side in the road and waiting for assistance and instructions, and adjuring the struggling ‘Golly’ to keep quiet an’ not make a fool of herself. ‘Golly’ took the advice so completely that, having quietened, she refused—although the mud clamped about her legs may have had something to do with it—to move a limb thereafter. At first Ruff and the other drivers called to assist tried to persuade her to get her fore-feet on the bank, then by passing a drag-rope round her fore-legs tried to pull them from under her and up on to firm ground. The only result was to upset her balance and set her slowly sinking sideways until her body was completely covered and only her neck and head were above water. It began to look as if the horse must drown in a four- or five-foot ditch.
Meantime the wagon was man-handled along and into the side of the road and the stream of vehicles resumed their interrupted march, rumbling past a busy rescue party grouped at the ditch-side, working in the light of a couple of lanterns with picks and spades and drag-ropes, to extricate the sunken ‘Golly.’ At last a shelving cut was made in the bank of the ditch, and Driver Ruff, already three parts soaked with splashings and fumblings to fix a rope correctly about his horse, completed the job and the soaking by plunging boldly into the ditch and passing a couple of ropes under the mare’s body. A string of men tailed on to the ropes, and at the word from an A.S.C. officer who had taken charge of the proceedings threw their weight into a regular tug-of-war heave, and hauled the animal out bodily on to the shelving bank, up it, and on to the road.
It was after ten o’clock before the wheelers were hooked in and the wagon swung into the traffic procession, with Driver Ruff soaked and shivering on the box. In ten minutes he had to pull up again for another block somewhere in the darkness ahead. He climbed down and stamped to and fro for full thirty minutes. Then he went and rummaged out a couple of box-lids he had been saving in his wagon for firewood, and, always keeping a wary ear turned to the road for the sound of callings and crunching wheels that would tell him the transport was on the move again, jumped the ditch, hunted in the darkness of a patch of wood, and managed to collect a small armful of twigs and branches. He split his dry wood, built it up and lit it, his fingers so numbed and shaking that he could scarcely fumble out a match. Under the shelter of his cap—it was still drizzling fine rain—he managed to get a brisk flame going, and when he had it burning strong and bright piled his twigs and branches on it. The wood hissed and sputtered, but caught at last, and tongues of flame began to crackle up, throwing a cheerful radiance on the wet faces and forms of the men who quickly crowded round and a most grateful glow of life-giving warmth on Driver Ruff, crouched with chattering teeth and blue lips close over the blaze. But before the fire had even completely caught there came a distant shout, repeated along and down the line, ‘Get mounted—get mounted,’ and the sound, far off at first but rapidly coming nearer and nearer, of tramping hoof-beats, scrunching wheels, and the rumble of moving wagons. The men about the fire scattered and ran to their horses, and Ruff had no choice but to leave his precious fire and run with them. The procession started, wagon after wagon—and within two hundred yards halted again. The disgusted Ruff had the mortification of seeing his fire blazing up strongly and cheerfully and immediately surrounded by a fresh crowd of the nearest men. It was too far to go back, since the move might come again any minute, and anyhow Ruff guessed the difficulty he would have in forcing a way to the front of the dense ring about his own fire. He tried to wrap his wet coat closer about him, and sat huddled and shivering on his seat for another half-hour before the way was clear and the wagons crawled on again.
It was nearly midnight when he dragged wearily into camp. He took his horses’ bits out, slacked their girths, gave them generous feeds, and when their nosebags were empty hung a net full of hay to the point of the wagon-pole, and then went to the cook-house, where he was given a mess-tin of soup and meat and a mug of hot tea. These things finished to the last bite and drop, he, by special and gracious favour of the cook, took off his soaking boots and hung his wet jacket before the embers of the fire, sat himself beside it, and dropped instantly into deep sleep. This, be it noted, was the only sleep he had been able to have for some thirty-six hours. The night before the column marched he had been out with his wagon drawing rations from ‘Refilling Point,’ had been from 6 P.M. on the road, waiting his turn for loading, moving up a wagon’s length at a time to the loading-place, where, under the light of a couple of lanterns, men were hacking up cheeses, dismembering sides of bacon, trundling out boxes of bully and biscuits and tins of tea and sugar. Driver Ruff had pulled out as soon as his wagon was loaded, waited for the others to complete their loading, moved on to rejoin his unit with them. Delays and checks on a road already, even at that early hour, astir with traffic, had prevented their reaching the camping-ground until about a couple of hours before the hour fixed to turn out on the march, and that brief time had been fully occupied by Ruff, first in watering and feeding and rubbing down his horses, and then in getting his own breakfast, packing his kit for the road, and harnessing up again.
Now, as may be imagined, he slept heavily, sitting huddled over the half-dead fire, on this his second night out of bed, after a day of wearying and strenuous work—and in case that be not properly understood it may be remarked that sitting on the hard wooden seat of a jolting wagon, bumping and jarring over a rough road, holding a pair of ‘heavy draught’ horses and steering them with a constantly needed care, hauling them up every few minutes, all these things are actually tiring hard physical work.
But he only slept for half an hour. At the end of that time he was shaken roughly awake and told to get a move on, and to fall in outside the lines before hooking in his horses. He rose stiffly, sore in every joint and aching in every limb as if he had been beaten and bruised with a club. The fire was dead and he was chilled to the marrow with the cold that had struck in from his wet clothes, with the more miserable cold that comes out of late and insufficient sleep. He shook like a man in the ague, and his teeth chattered as he thrust his arms into the clammy dampness and coldness of his jacket’s clinging sleeves. Putting on his boots was sheer torture. They were icy cold, and the wet leather was stiff and hard as a board. Altogether he was just about as miserable, cold, and uncomfortable as a man can be, as he hobbled stiffly from the cook-house into the bitter rawness of the winter morning. As he went out one of the cooks came in and commenced to make up the fire, and it suddenly struck Driver Ruff what a magnificent and enviable job a cook had, always messing about with a warm fire and hot water and other of the pleasantest things in life. The cook, roused from a warm straw bed in the cold of one o’clock to light a fire with damp wood, probably held a different opinion of the pleasures of his office. Ruff had three minutes with his horses before the ‘Fall in’ was called. They whickered and nuzzled at him, each jealously pushing the other’s head aside as he spoke to them and rubbed their noses and pulled their ears. ‘After all, Golly,’ he said, ‘a cook don’t have horses; eh, Wog?’ and at that thought the cook’s job lost its savour and a gleam of content warmed the driver’s soul.
A figure suddenly appeared in the shape of lamp-illumined breeches and boots and a blot of shadow above them, and his sergeant spoke briskly: ‘Hullo, Ruff. Merry Christmas.’
‘Lumme!’ said Driver Ruff. ‘If I hadn’t clean forgot—same to you, sergeant.’
‘An’ may we see the next at ’ome,’ said the sergeant. ‘Now what about this pair o’ yours? Had a stiffish day yesterday, didn’t they?’