The business of getting ready was speeded up. The Ordnance Department, hitherto of miserly reluctance, gave us lavishly of their best. Gas masks were dished out, and every man marched into a gas chamber,--there either to get gassed or come out with the assurance that the mask had no defects! Final issues of clothing and equipment kept the Q.M.S. sweating from dawn to dusk, and the Major signed countless pay books, indents and documents generally.
Thus we were ready and eager to go and strafe the Hun in the merry month of May, 1917.
The personnel of the battery was odd but extremely interesting. Pip Don and myself knew every man, bombardier, corporal and sergeant, what he had done, tried to do, or could do. In a word we knew the battery inside out and exactly what it was worth. Not a man of them had ever been on active service, but we felt quite confident that the test of shell fire would not find them wanting. The great majority of them were Scots, and they were all as hard as nails.
The third subaltern was an unknown quantity, but all of us had been out. The Captain hadn’t.
The Major had been in every battle in France since 1914, but he didn’t know us or the battery, and if we felt supremely confident in him, it was, to say the least of it, impossible for him to return the compliment. He himself will tell you that he didn’t win the confidence of the battery until after a bold and rapidly-decided move in full light of day, which put us on the flank of a perfectly hellish bombardment. That may be true of some of the men, but as far as Pip Don and myself went, we had adopted him after the first five minutes, and never swerved,--having, incidentally, some wonderful arguments about him in the sleeping quarters at Heytesbury with the subalterns of other batteries.
It is extraordinary how the man at the head of a little show like that remains steadily in the lime-light. Everything he does, says or looks is noted, commented on and placed to either his credit or debit until the men have finally decided that he’s all right or--not. If they come to the first decision, then the Major’s life is not more of a burden to him than Divisional and Corps Staffs and the Hun can make it. The battery will do anything he asks of it, at any hour of day or night, and will go on shooting till the last man is knocked out. If, on the other hand, they decide that he is not all right, God help him. He gives orders. They are not carried out. Why? An infinite variety of super-excellent excuses. It is a sort of passive resistance, and he has got to be a mighty clever man to unearth the root of it and kill it before it kills him.