We had beefsteak, warmed-over pigs’ feet, coffee, potato cakes, fresh lettuce, Graham gems, and two kinds of pie, and the next day we sailed for Manila.

Them early days in the Fillypines was the toughest proposition I was ever up against.  Things hadn’t settled down as they did afterward, nobody knowing where he was at, and all of us shoved up to the front higgeldy-piggeldy; and, being Regulars, they gave us the heavy end of it, having to do all the fighting while the Volunteers was being taught the difference between a Krag-Jorgensen and a Moro Castle.  It was all front in them days—­for the Regulars!  But we were lucky in our commissary sergeant, a splendid young man named Orr, and we lived well from the start and never came down to rations.  The battery got quite a name for having griddle-cakes for breakfast and carrying a lot of dog generally in the eating line, and someone wrote a song, to the toon of Chickamauga, called “The Fried Chicken of Battery B.”  But I tell you, it wasn’t all fried chicken either, for the fighting was heavy and hot, and a good many of the boys pegged out.  If ever there was a battery that looked for trouble and got it—­it was Battery B!  But we took good care of our commissary sergeant—­did I mention he was a splendid young man named Orr?—­and though we dropped a good many numbers, wounded, dead, sick, and missing—­we kep’ up the good name of the battery and had canned butter and pop-overs nearly every day.

Benny and I were chums, but nobody knows what that word means till you’ve kept warm under the same blanket and kneeled side by side in the firing-line.  It brings men together like nothing else in the world, and it’s queer the unlikely sorts that take to one another.  I was so common and uneddicated that I wonder what Benny ever saw to like in me, for, as I said, he was a regular Mommer’s boy and splendidly brought up and an electrician.  Religious, too, and a church member!  But he was powerful fond of me, and never went into action but what he’d let off a little prayer to himself that I might come out all right and go to heaven if bolo-ed.  Pity he hadn’t taken as much trouble for himself, for one day while we were lying in a trench, and firing for all we were worth, I suddenly saw that look in his face that a soldier gets to know so well.

“Benny, you’re shot!” I yelled out, dropping my Krag and all struck of a heap.

“Shot, nothing!” he answered, and then he keeled over in the dirt and his legs began to kick.

He took a powerful long time to die, and there was even some talk of sending him down to the base hospital, the field one being that full and constantly needed at our heels.  But he pleaded with the doctors and was allowed as a favour to stay on and die where he was minded—­with the battery.  I was with him all I could, and I’ll never forget how good that commissary sergeant was, a splendid young man named Orr, who always had a little pot of chicken broth for Benny and cornstarch, and what he