On the Fringe of the Great Fight | Page 5

Captain, and never, I suppose, did any other Captain receive such hearty cheers and such a tremendous "tiger." It was the culmination of a marvellous and historic trip.
The trip to Salisbury by motor next day was a dream--a dream of hedges and great trees meeting over-head; of hills and valleys with little thatched cottages and villages nestling in them, of beautiful estates and sheep, of quaint old English farms, of ancient towns and villages. Through Ivy Bridge and Honiton to Exeter, where we stopped to see the beautiful old Cathedral, so warm and rich in colouring and passing by one long series of beautiful pictures, in perhaps the most charming pastoral landscape in the world, we came to the white-scarred edge of the famous Salisbury Plain.
CHAPTER II.
ON SALISBURY PLAINS.
It was on the 15th of October that we landed in Plymouth. A few days later the whole of the 33,000 (with the exception of a few errant knights who had gone off on independent pilgrimages) were more or less settled on Salisbury Plain. The force was divided into four distinct camps miles apart. One infantry brigade and the headquarters staff was stationed at Bustard Camp; one section was camped a couple of miles away, at West Down South; a third at West Down North still farther away, and the fourth at Pond Farm about five miles from Bustard. Convenience of water supplies and arrangements for the administration of the forces made these divisions necessary.
The plains of Salisbury, ideal for summer military camps, are rolling, prairie-like lands stretching for miles, broken by a very occasional farm house or by plantations of trees called "spinneys." A thin layer of earth and turf covered the chalk which was hundreds of feet in depth; at any spot a blow with a pick would bring up the white chalk filled with black flints. The hills by which the plains were reached rose sharply from the surface of Wiltshire, so that Salisbury Plain itself could be easily distinguished miles away by the white, water worn rifts in the hillsides.
When we first arrived the plains gave promise of being a fine camping ground. Tents were pitched, canteens opened, work was begun and our boys settled down impatiently to receive the further training necessary before passing over to that Mecca to which one and all looked forward--the battle grounds of Flanders.
For a few days all went well; then it began to rain. About the middle of November it settled down in earnest and rained steadily for a month; sometimes it merely drizzled, at other times it poured; but it never stopped, except for an hour or so. The constant tramp of many feet speedily churned into mud the clay turf overlaying the chalk, and the rain could not percolate through this mixture as it did the unbroken sod. In a few days the mud was one inch--four inches--and even a foot deep. Many a time I waded through mud up to my knees.
The smooth English roads, lacking depth of road-metal, were speedily torn to pieces by the heavy traffic of motors and steam traction engines. Passing cars and lorries sprayed the hedges with a thin mud-emulsion formed from the road binder, and exposed the sharp flints which, like so much broken glass, tore to pieces the tires of the motors.
Cold high winds, saturated with moisture, accompanied the rain and searched one's very marrow. Nothing would exclude these sea breezes but skin or fur coats, and though accustomed to a severe climate, we Canadians felt the cold in England as we never had at home. Sometimes the temperature fell below the freezing point, and occasionally we had sleet, hail or snow for variety. Tents were often blown down by the hundreds, and it was a never-to-be-forgotten sight watching a small army of soldiers trying to hold and pin down some of the large mess tents, while rope after rope snapped under the straining of the flapping canvas. One day the post office tent collapsed, and some of the mail disappeared into the heavens, never to return.
The officers of the headquarter staff were fairly comfortable in comparison to the others. Our tents were pitched in a quadrangle formed by four rows of trees and scrub, which had evidently been planted around the site of a former house and served to break the high winds. Each officer had a tent with a wooden floor. Mine was carpeted with an extra blanket to exclude draughts and make it feel comfortable under one's bare feet in the morning. The tent was heated by an oil stove which was kept burning night and day; and at night I slept snug and warm in the interior of a Jaeger sleeping blanket in a Wolseley kit. My batman, Karner, had made a table from some boxes and