When, at last, I sat down on one of the benches, the whole place seemed to float by me.  Nothing would stand still.  The sensation was like the water dizziness which makes one feel he is being rapidly propelled upstream.  But after sitting awhile, it passed, and I began to recognize some of our fellows.  Frost, of my own battalion, was there, and when I told him I had had nothing to eat since the early morning of the day before, he immediately produced a hardtack biscuit and scraped out the bottom of his jam tin.  They had been served with a ration of war-bread, and several of the boys offered me a share of their scanty allowance, but the first mouthful was all I could take.  It was sour, heavy, and stale.

The school pump had escaped the fate of the last pump I had seen, and was in good working order, and its asthmatic creaking as it brought up the stream of water was music in my ears.  We went out in turns and drank like thirsty cattle.  I drank until my jaws were stiff as if with mumps, and my ears ached, and in a few minutes my legs were tied in cramps.

While I was vainly trying to rub them out with my one good hand, Fred McKelvey came up and told me a sure cure for leg-cramp.  It is to turn the toes up as far as possible, and straighten out the legs, and it worked a cure for me.  He said he had taken the cramps out of his legs this way when he was in the water.

I remember some of the British Columbia boys who were there.  Sergeants Potentier, George Fitz, and Mudge, of Grand Forks; Reid, Diplock, and Johnson, of Vancouver; Munroe and Wildblood, of Rossland; Keith, Palmer, Larkins, Scott, and Croak.  Captain Scudamore, my Company Captain, came over to where I sat, and kindly inquired about my wounds.  He wrote down my father’s address, too, and said he would try to get a letter to him.

There was a house next door—­quite a fine house with a neat paling and long, shuttered windows, at which the vines were beginning to grow.  It looked to be in good condition, except that part of the verandah had been torn away.  The shutters were closed on its long, graceful windows, giving it the appearance of a tall, stately woman in heavy mourning.

When we were at the pump, we heard a gentle tapping, and, looking up, we saw a very handsome dark-eyed Belgian woman at one of the windows.  Instinctively we saluted, and quick as a flash she held a Union Jack against the pane!

A cheer broke from us involuntarily, and the guards sprang to attention, suspecting trouble.  But the flag was gone as quickly as it came, and when we looked again, the shutters were closed and the deep, waiting silence had settled down once more on the stately house of shutters.

But to us it had become suddenly possessed of a living soul!  The flash of those sad black eyes, as well as the glimpse of the flag, seemed to call to us to carry on!  They typified to us exactly what we were fighting for!