Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 156, February 19, 1919

Excerpt

CAST.

The auctioneer glanced at his book. "Number 29," he said, "black mare, aged, blind in near eye, otherwise sound."

The cold rain and the biting north-east wind did not add to the appearance of Number 29, as she stood, dejected, listless, with head drooping, in the centre of the farmers and horse-dealers who were attending the sale of cast Army horses. She looked as though she realised that her day had waned, and that the bright steel work, the soft well-greased leather, the snowy head-rope and the shining curb were to be put aside for less noble trappings.

She had a curiously shaped white blaze, and I think it was that, added to the description of her blindness, which stirred my memory within me. I closed my eyes for a second and it all came back to me, the gun stuck in the mud, the men straining at the wheels, the shells bursting, the reek of high explosive, the two leaders lying dead on the road, and, above all, two gallant horses doing the work of four and pulling till you'd think their hearts would burst.

I stepped forward and, looking closer at the mare's neck, found what I had expected, a great scar. That settled it. I approached the auctioneer and asked permission to speak to the crowd for a few moments.

"Well," said he, "I'm supposed to do the talking here, you know."

"It won't do you any harm," I pleaded, "and it will give me a chance to pay off a big debt."

"Right," he said, smiling; "carry on."

"Gentlemen," I said, "about this time a year ago I was commanding a battery in France. It was during the bad days, and we were falling back with the Hun pressing hard upon us. My guns had been firing all the morning from a sunken road, when we got orders to limber up and get back to a rear position. We hadn't had a bad time till then, a few odd shells, but nothing that was meant especially for our benefit. And then, just as we were getting away, they spotted us, and a battery opened on us good and strong. By a mixture of good luck and great effort we'd got all the guns away but one, when a shell landed just in front of the leaders and knocked them both out with their driver; at the same time the gun was jerked off the road into a muddy ditch. Almost simultaneously another shell killed one of the wheelers, and there we were with one horse left to get the gun out of the ditch and along a road that was almost as bad as the ditch itself.

"It looked hopeless, and it was on the tip of my tongue to give orders to abandon the gun, when suddenly out of the blue there appeared on the bank above us a horse, looking unconcernedly down at us.

"In those days loose horses were straying all over the country, and I took this to be one from another battery which had come to us for company.

"I turned to one of the men. 'Catch that mare quick.'

"In a few minutes we had the harness off the dead wheeler and on the new-comer. Pull? Gentlemen, if you could have seen those two horses pull!

"We'd just got a move on the gun when another shell came and seemed to burst right on top of the strange mare....