Finally I returned to the brigade extraordinarily fit, very keen and with perhaps the first glimmerings of what a gun was. A scourge of a mysterious skin disease ran through the horses at that time. It looked like ringworm and wasn’t,--according to the Vet. But we subalterns vied with each other in curing our sections and worked day and night on those unfortunate animals with tobacco juice, sulphur and every unpleasant means available until they looked the most wretched brutes in the world.
Little by little the training built itself up. From standing gun drill we crept to battery gun drill and then took the battery out for the day and lost it round Aldershot in that glorious pine country, coming into action over and over again.
The Colonel watched it all from a distance with a knowledgeable eye and at last took a hand. Brigade shows then took place, batteries working in conjunction with each other and covering zones.
Those were good days in the early spring with all the birds in full chorus, clouds scudding across a blue sky, and the young green feathering all the trees, days of hard physical work with one’s blood running free and the companionship of one’s own kind; inspired by a friendly rivalry in doing a thing just a little bit better than the other fellow--or trying to: with an occasional week-end flung in like a sparkling jewel.
And France? Did we think about it? Yes, when the lights were turned out at night and only the point of the final cigarette like a glowworm marked the passage of hand to mouth. Then the talk ran on brothers “out there” and the chances of our going soon. None of them had been except me, but I could only give them pictures of star-shell at night and the heart-breaking mud, and they wanted gunner talk.
It was extraordinary what a bond grew up between us all in those days, shared, I think, by the senior officers. We declared ourselves the first brigade in the Division, and each battery was of course hotly the finest in the brigade; our Colonel was miles above any other Colonel in the Army and our Battery Commanders the best fellows that ever stepped. By God, we’d show Fritz!----
We had left Fleet and the golf club and moved into hutments at Deepcut about the time I returned from the gunnery course. Now the talk centred round the firing practice when every man and officer would be put to the test and one fine morning the order came to proceed to Trawsfynydd, Wales.