CHAPTER XVI

It had turned very hot, now, at the full of the day.  Indeed, it was grilling weather, and there in the battery, in a hollow, close down beside a little run or stream, it was even hotter than on the shell-swept bare top of the ridge.  So the Canadian gunners had stripped down for comfort.  Not a man had more than his under-shirt on above his trousers, and many of them were naked to the waist, with their hide tanned to the color of old saddles.

These laddies reminded me of those in the first battery I had seen.  They were just as calm, and just as dispassionate as they worked in their mill—­it might well have been a mill in which I saw them working.  Only they were no grinding corn, but death—­death for the Huns, who had brought death to so many of their mates.  But there was no excitement, there were no cries of hatred and anger.

They were hard at work.  Their work, it seemed, never came to an end or even to a pause.  The orders rang out, in a sort of sing-song voice.  After each shot a man who sat with a telephone strapped about his head called out corrections of the range, in figures that were just a meaningless jumble to me, although they made sense to the men who listened and changed the pointing of the guns at each order.

[ILLUSTRATION:  Capt.  John Lauder and Comrades Before The Trenches In France (See Lauder07.jpg)]

Their faces, that, like their bare backs and chests, looked like tanned leather, were all grimy from their work among the smoke and the gases.  And through the grime the sweat had run down like little rivers making courses for themselves in the soft dirt of a hillside.  They looked grotesque enough, but there was nothing about them to make me feel like laughing, I can tell you!  And they all grinned amiably when the amazed and disconcerted Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour came tumbling in among them.  We all felt right at hame at once—­ and I the more so when a chap I had met and come to know well in Toronto during one of my American tours came over and gripped my hand.

“Aye, but it’s good to see your face, Harry!” he said, as he made me welcome.

This battery had done great work ever since it had come out.  No battery in the whole army had a finer record, I was told.  And no one needed to tell me the tale of its losses.  Not far away there was a little cemetery, filled with doleful little crosses, set up over mounds that told their grim story all too plainly and too eloquently.

The battery had gone through the Battle of Vimy Ridge and made a great name for itself.  And now it was set down upon a spot that had seen some of the very bloodiest of the fighting on that day.  I saw here, for the first time, some of the most horrible things that the war holds.  There was a little stream, as I said, that ran through the hollow in which the battery was placed, and that stream had been filled with blood, not water, on the day of the battle.