The guns, too, were of a new pattern.  The H.A.C. at home is armed with the 15-pounder guns in use in the Regular Field Artillery.  But for the campaign, as the C.I.V.  Battery, we had taken out new weapons (presented by the City of London), in the shape of four 12-1/2-pounder Vickers-Maxim field guns, taking fixed ammunition, having practically no recoil, and with a much improved breech-mechanism.  They turned out very good, but of course, being experimental, required practice in handling, which could not have been obtained in the few weeks in the London barracks.

On the other hand, the large majority of us were old hands, our senior officers and N.C.O.’s were from the Regular Horse Artillery, and all ranks were animated by an intense desire to reach the utmost efficiency at the earliest possible moment.

My impressions of the next ten days are of grooming, feeding, and exercising in the cool twilight of dawn, sweltering dusty drills, often in sand-storms, under a blazing mid-day sun, of “fatigues” of all sorts, when we harnessed ourselves in teams to things, or made and un-made mountains of ammunition boxes—­a constant round of sultry work, tempered by cool bathes on white sand, grapes from peripatetic baskets, and brief intervals of languid leisure, with al fresco meals of bully-beef and dry bread outside our tents.

Time was marked by the three daily stable hours, each with their triple duty of grooming, feeding, and watering, the “trivial round” which makes up so much of the life of a driver.  As a very humble representative of that class, my horses were two “spares,” that is, not allotted to any team.  Much to my disgust, I was not even provided with a saddle, and had to do my work bareback, which filled me with indignation at the time, but only makes me smile now.  My roan was always a sort of a pariah among the sub-division horses, an incorrigible kicker and outcast, having to be picketed on a peg outside the lines for his misdeeds.  Many a kick did I get from him; and yet I always had a certain affection for him in all his troubled, unloved life, till the day when, nine months later, he trotted off to the re-mount depot at Pretoria, to vex some strange driver in a strange battery.  My other horse, a dun, was soon taken as a sergeant’s mount, and I had to take on an Argentine re-mount, a rough, stupid little mare, with kicking and biting propensities which quite threw the roan’s into the shade.  She also had a peg of ignominy, and three times a day I had to dance perilously round my precious pair with a tentative body-brush and hoof-pick.  The scene generally ended in the pegs coming away from the loose sand, and a perspiring chase through the lines.  I had some practice, too, in driving in a team, for one of our drivers “went sick,” and I took his place in the team of an ammunition-waggon for several days.