THE RETURN PUSH. BY QUEX, XVIII. WHEN, on October 21, I returned to France, the war had made a very big stride towards its end. Cambrai had been regained, and Le Cateau"Lee Katoo," the men insisted on calling it-taken. Ostend was ours, Lille was ours; over Palestine we had cast our mantle. Our own Division, still hard at it, had gone forward twenty-four miles during my fortnight's leave in England. Stories of their doings trickled towards me when I broke the journey at Amiens on my way back to the lines. I met an infantry captain bound for England. "It's been all open fighting this last fortnight-cavalry, and forced marches, and all that and I don't want to hear any more talk of the new Armies not being able to carry out a war of movement," he said chirpily. "The men have been magnificent. The old Boche is done now-but we're making no mistakes; we're after him all the while. "Dam funny, you know, some of the things that are happening up there. The Boche has left a lot of coal dumps behind, and every one's after it. There's a 2000-ton pile at C, and it was disappearing so rapidly that they put a guard on it. I was walking with my colonel the "But what is this Australian doing? Has he any authority to draw coal? Did he show you a chit?' "No, sir,' replied the sentry; 'I thought, as he had a Government waggon, it would be all right.' "Upon my Sam!' said the colonel, astonished. Then he tackled the Australian, "What authority have you for taking away this coal?' he asked. "The Australian stood up and said, 'I don't want any authority-I bally well fought for it,' and went on with his shovelling. "Frankly, the colonel didn't know what to say; but he has a sense of humour. Extraordinary fellows!' he said to me as he walked off. "Then we came across an American who was 'scrounging' or something in an empty house. He jumped to attention when he saw the colonel, and saluted very smartly. But what do you think? He saluted with a bowler hat on; found it in the house, I expect.... I tell you it was an eye-opening day for the colonel." I lorry-hopped to the village that I had been told was Divisional Headquarters; but they had moved the day before, seven miles farther forward. There were nearly 200 civilians here. I saw 8 few faded ancient men in worn corduroys and blue-peaked caps; a bent old orone, in a blue apron, hobbled with a water-bucket past a corner shop-a grocer's -shuttered, sluttish from want of paint; three tiny children, standing in doorways, wore a strangely old expression. There was a pathetically furtive air about all these people. For four years they had been under the Boche. Of actual, deathbringing, frightening war they had seen not more than five days. The battle had swept over and beyond them, carrying with it the feared and hated German, and the main fighting force of the pursuing British as well. But it was too soon yet for them to forget, or to throw off a sort of lurk ing dread that even now the Boohe might return. I got a lift in another lorry along a road crumbling under the unusual amount of traffic that weighed upon it. Our advance had been so swift that the war soars on the country. side had not entirely blighted its normal characteristics. Here were shell-holes, but no long succession of abandoned gun "What sort of a time have you had?" I inquired. "Oh, most exciting! Shan't forget the day we crossed the Le Cateau river. We were the advance Brigade. The Engineers were were supposed to put bridges across for us; the material came up all right, but the pioneers, who were to do the work, missed the way. The sapper officer who had brought the material wanted to wait till the proper people arrived, but the Boche was shelling and machine-gunning like mad, and the colonel said the bridgebuilding must be got on with at once. The colonel was great that day. Old Johns of D Battery kept buzzing along with suggestions, but the colonel put his foot down, and said, 'It's the sapper officer's work; let him do it.' And the bridges were really well put up. All the guns got across safely, although C Battery had a team knocked out." I walked by Collinge's side through a village of sloping roofs, single-storied red-brick houses, and mud - clogged streets. It was the village which our two brigades of artillery occupied when the Armistice was signed, where the King came to see us, and M. le Maire, in his excitement, gave His Majesty that, typically French, shall I say? clasp of intimacy and friendliness, a left-handed handshake. "Curious thing happened on that rise," remarked Collinge when we were in open country again. "The colonel and the adjutant were with an infantry General and his Staff officers, reconnoitring. The General had a little bitch something like a whippet. She downed a hare, and, though it brought them into view of the Boche, the General, the colonel, and the others chased after them like mad-I believe the colonel won the race-but the adjutant will tell you all about it." teries came into action under ... Away on the left a lone tree aoted as a landmark for a sunken road. "Brigade tried to make a headquarters there," went on Collinge, "but a sig. naller got knocked out, and the Boche began using the tree as a datum point; so the colonel ordered & shift." Twenty rough wooden orosses rose We reached the outskirts mournful and remote in a wide, of C, descending a steep moist mangel - field. "The pavé road. "They shelled this cavalry got it badly there," place like stink yesterday," Colsaid Collinge. "A 4.2 gun linge told me. "Headquarters turned on them from were in one of those little range, and did frightful execu- houses on the left for one tion." We were near to a night, and their waggon line cross-road, marked balefully by is there now, so you'll be able a two-storied house, out in to get a horse. . I heard half so that the interior was that Major Bartlett had both opened to view like a doll's his chargers killed yesterday house, and by other shell- when C Battery came through. mauled buildings. "The bat-... Isn't that one of them, close that black horse lying under Bullivant, with a smashed arm the trees?" I looked and saw many horses lying dead on both sides of the road, and thought little of it. That was war. Then all my senses were strung up to attention: a small bay horse lay stretched out on the pathway, his head near the kerb. There was a shapeliness of the legs and a fineness of the mud-checkered coat that seemed familiar. I stepped over to look. Yes, it was my own horse "Tommy," that old Castle, our ex-adjutant, had given me-old Castle's "handy little horse." A gaping hole in the head told all that needed to be told. I found "Swiffy" and the doctor in the workman's oottage that had become Brigade waggon-line headquarters, Yes, "Tommy" had been killed the day before. My groom, Morgan, was riding him. The Boohe were sending over shrapnel, high in the air, and one bullet had found its billet. Poor little horse! Spirited, but easy to handle, always in condition, always well-mannered. Ah, well! we had had many good days together. Poor little horse! I want always to remember B, the village of gardens and hedgerows and autumn tints where we saw the war out, and lay under shell-fire for the last time; whence we fought our final battle on November 4th, when young Hearn of A Battery was killed by machine-gun bullets at 70 yards' range, and Major and a crippled thigh, huddled under a wall until Dumble found him - the concluding fight that brought me strange war trophy in a golfing-iron found in a hamlet that the Boohe had sprawled upon for four full years.. And the name punched on the iron was that of an Oxford Street firm. Collinge and I rode into B in the wan light of an October afternoon. At & oross-roads that the Boche had blown up-"They didn't do it well enough; the guns got round by that side track, and we were only held up ten minutes," said Collinge Brigade Headquarters' signboard had been planted in a hedge. My way lay up a slushy tree-bordered lane; Collinge bade me good-bye, and rode on down the winding street. There were the usual welcoming smiles. Manning gave me a "Had a good leave, sir?” in his deep-sea voice, and Wilde came out to show where my horse could be stabled. "It's a top-hole farm, and after the next move we'll bring Headquarters waggon line up here. The colonel says you can have his second charger now that you've lost Tommy.' He's taking on Major Veasey's mare, the one with the cold back that bucks a bit. She's a nice creature if she's given plenty of work." "How is the colonel?" I asked. "Oh, he's in great form; says the war may end any ... minute. Major Simpson and used as a kitchen-Meddings, our regular cook, was on leave. The other room, with its couple of spacious civilian beds, we used mess, and the colonel and the adjutant slept there. The only wall decorations were two "samplers executed by a small daughter of the house, a school certifieate in a plain frame, and a couple of gaudy-tinselled religious pictures. A pair of pot dogs on the mantelpiece were as stupidly ugly as some of our own mid-Victorian cottage treasures. And there were the usual glass-covered orange blossoms mounted on red plush and gilt leaves-the wedding custom traditional to the country districts of Northern France. The inner door of this room opened directly into the stable where our horses were stalled. An infantry colonel and his staff occupied the one large and the two small rooms to the right of the entrance-hall; but after dinner they left us to go forward, and my servant put down a mattress on the stone floor of one of the smaller rooms for me to sleep upon. Wilde took possession of the other other little chamber. The large room, which contained a colossal oak wardrobe, beowner. A row of came our mess after breakdecently ventilated stables fast next day. The signallers faced the farmhouse, while had fixed their telephone exat the end of the courtyard, change in the vaulted cellar opposite to the entrance gates, beneath the house, and the stood an enormous high-doored servants and grooms crowded barn. The entrance-hall of the there as well when the Boche's house gave, on the the left, to night-shelling grew threatentwo connecting stone-flagged ing. rooms, one of which Manning The end wall of the longfronted, narrow farmhouse loomed up gauntly beside the pillared entrance to the reotangular courtyard. A weathervane in the form of a tin trotting horse flaunted itself on the topmost point. This end wall rose to such height because, though the farmhouse was one-storied, its steepsloping roof enclosed an attic big enough to give sixty men sleeping room. Just below the weather-vane was a hole poked out by the Boohe for observation purposes. Our adjutant used to climb up to it twice daily as a sort of constitutional. Some one had left in this perch a bound volume of a Romanist weekly, with highly dramatic, fearfully coloured illustrations. As the house contained some twenty of these volumes, I presumed that they betrayed the religious leanings of the farm's absent After a long deprivation we |