THE YPRES TIMES
169
what he was worth. This was the spirit that we all tried to foster in the battery,
so I at once conferred on Driver Brown the rank of O.C. chatfcutter.
In the days of horse draught in the Field Artillery the effectiveness of a battery was
limited by the ability of the teams to haul guns and ammunition to where they were
needed. In Macedonia and Palestine such transport included the crossing of rivers
by fords, scaling of considerable mountains in roadless country, and the crossing of
bogs and swamps and other obstacles. The horses had to be kept, often in spite of
totally inadequate forage, in the pink of condition to be able to do their work and
to make the scanty supply of hay go as far as possible, every Dit was chaffed and fed in
the nosebags. This meant that the chaffcutter must be kept turning round and round
almost continuously. It is truly "hard labour" turning the wheel of that machine,
but little Driver Brown never faltered either in the bitter cold of a Macedonian Winter
or in the tropical heat of the desert. What this meant to so small a man as him may
be imagined when I say that in the days when the long field service boots were
issued in 1916 to soldiers whose duties took them into the deep mud at the horselines,
no pair could be found short enough in the leg to allow this tiny driver's knees to bend,
and so he had to walk about without bending them until the saddler could find time
to cut the legs of his long boots down to allow him to walk properly.
Much of the splendid services of the horses was only made possible Dy the unceasing
toil of this stout-hearted little incompetent driver at the chaffcutter. He was very
proud of his office and well deserved to be.
The reinforcements which reached us in the big Somme battle in the summer of
1918 were totally untrained. One of them was a middle-aged German Jew, Gunner
Rosenberg, who was so unlikely a recruit that I made him extra-assistant-cook and
part-time boot-repairer, as in civil life he had been a cobbler in the East End.
In the course of a severe German gas bombardment many of our best gunners were
seriously gassed and had to be forthwith evacuated to hospital. I sorted out the less
seriously disabled as they arrived at the waggon-lines riding on the ammunition wag
gons, and ordered them, if they were able, to sit by the fire in the cookhouse until
morning. They choked if they attempted to lie down.
When daylight came a pitiable group of men, hoarse and with streaming eyes, cough
ing and spluttering, were still sitting round the cookhouse fire; with the exception of
the Jew cobbler they were our most valuable men, layers and limber-gunners,
and these I begged to try and stick it out, and the}' all agreed like the willing sportsmen
that they were.
Gunner Rosenberg was different. He was a newcomer, an untrained foreign Jew,
by birth presumably not interested in a British victory. I thought it unnecessary
even to ask him to stay with us (one does not order men in the plight of these poor
fellows to go or stay) and told him he'd better get off to hospital.
But this grey-haired German Jew stranger would not hear of it. He staggered
to his feet and whispered hoarsely No, Zir, I don't vant to go. I could still go on
helping mit der cooking."
I shook his hand for I had no words to express my appreciation of gallantry such
as his.
To conclude these anecdotes illustrative of the unselfisn spirit of the Firing Line, 1
want to set down an instance of self-sacrifice which reaches the summit of its splendour.
All of us have read with admiration the famous story of how the dying Sir Philip
Sidney at Zutphen gave the cup of water to a wounded soldier with the classic words
Thy need is greater than mine."
My own War Memories include a parallel incident which took place on the Somme
Sector about September, 1918. In the 44th Brigade R.F.A. our Battery, "D" Battery,
