As we would proceed along the railway and approach a nearby town the little French children would shout out, "_Bon Voyage, Bon Voyage_, Bully Beef, Bully Beef, Biscuit, Biscuit."
Our boys would throw them out the rations, which would be picked up quickly by the poor French children. Upon arrival at the railhead each man would turn in all the extra food he had not eaten and would then be marched to the depot to be assigned to billets for the night. In the morning the various drafts would be sorted out and sent to reinforce their fighting units.
Here is an incident that occurred whilst I was in charge of a party at the "bull ring." A sergeant was giving a lecture on musketry to a class. He began in this strain: "The rifle is a soldier's best friend on active service." After that he described the length of the rifle, the length of the barrel, the muzzle velocity, the calibre of the ammunition used, the width of the lands, the depth of the grooves, and the mechanism of the bolt. He began to describe the care of arms. To emphasize his point, he repeated: "The rifle is the soldier's best friend and I want you to _treat it as such_. _Treat it as you would treat your wife_. Rub it well over with an oily rag." This caused a decided grin on the faces of the married men in the ranks.
We take great pains to train our men in machine gunnery. A barrage of machine guns on any part of the line is always dangerous to the enemy and is advantageous to us. Usually a barrage may be laid at distances from a thousand to five hundred yards. The cone of fire is very deadly, but when it gets as near as five hundred yards the trajectory, being flat or low, is then dangerous to us if we stand up, so that we have to be very careful how we work under it.
No soldiers in the world are fit to cope with the British soldier in bayonet fighting. Their training is intensive, and a man must be physically fit in every respect to be good at this element of warfare. A good boxer is usually a good bayonet fighter, and I notice that in the U.S. National Army there is great attention being paid to boxing as a means of making the men proficient at this game.
I remember an amusing incident which took place in the "bull ring." We had our bags suspended from horizontal bars by strong cords. These cords had a thin piece of twine tied between each bag. The bayonet fighters were placed in a trench, and at the word "Go," they had to run a distance of about fifty yards, jump over another trench, and make a lunge with a bayonet at the bag. One man, who did not notice this twine which was between the bags, made his lunge, then ran between the bags and did not stoop. The twine caught him right on the point of the nose, taking all the skin off it, and throwing him back into the trench. He could not realise how he had been thrown there, and it was only after he had been assisted out of the trench and was led up to the bags that he believed he had not been assaulted by some of his fellow soldiers. He said afterwards he never noticed the string between the bags.