itself in readiness to march at a two hours’ notice. Most significant of all, every day both officers and men spent hours at the ranges, learning to be marksmen. This in itself was prophetic of close and desperate fighting—it meant that the enemy was expected to be up against the muzzles of our guns. Who ever dreamt until now of training artillery to be riflemen!     

       These were the conditions under which we made Bully Beef’s acquaintance. The sergeants’ mess was in the cottage where his mother lived; he soon made friends with the Sergeant-Major. It wasn’t long before he began to appear upon parades, his grubby hand held fast in the big brown fist of one of the drivers or gunners. It was bad for good order and discipline, but none of us officers had the heart to forbid him. He soon learnt to obey the orders “Shun” and “Stand at ease,” and would hold himself steady with “eyes front”       to be inspected. It was about a fortnight after we had been billetted in the village that we discovered that we could no longer call him “Little Sister": he fell into the river when the horses were watering and had to go naked while his clothes were drying.     

       His parentage was a problem. Some said that he was the child of a rich married Frenchman; others that his father had been a quartermaster in a Highland battalion. We rather clung to the legend of his Scotch origin; his sturdy habit of throwing stones at people bigger than himself seemed to prove that he was British.     

       His mother is difficult to describe. She’s a pleasant, sun browned girl, with a happy smile and kindly ways of showing her contentment. She rarely looks at you; her eyes, which are gray, are always demurely cast down, and yet you feel that all the time she’s watching. Her head is always bare so that her hair, which would naturally be brown, is bleached to the colour of honey. Whenever you pass her she is humming a little song, and sometimes she laughs beneath her breath. Her hands are interminably busy, doing something for Bully Beef or some of our men. She devours her little son with a hungry passion and pushes him away from her in pretence that she does not care. Everything that she does she clothes in an atmosphere of tenderness. What her name is none of us know for certain, but we call her Suzette.     

       When we received the order to march out from her village, we thought that we were going 

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