To get on bridle-paths and roads free from lorry
traffic and let your horse out at full stretch over the fallen leaves
down some long grey-purple vista of bare trees, and feel the clean wind
whistling past your ears and smell the fresh odours of the great woods,
to see the blue smoke drifting up from some forester's cottage, or for a
moment in passing catch a glimpse of a fairy-story scene of charcoal
burners grouped together in a glade, was to ride into another world of
thought and feeling. My little horse John, one of the five horses left
of those who crossed with the battalion, felt it too--thought perhaps he
was in old England again. But the British soldier hates manoeuvres and
marches and drills and inspections. He would rather be left in peace in
his trenches, in a 'quiet' part of the line at least, than bothered
about those things. Movement, too, has an exhilarating effect on him,
and so when orders come to go back into action he tramps off with
remarkable goodwill. I remember one battalion of Royal Welsh Fusiliers,
suddenly rushed up from rest, pulled out of the station singing a song
of which the refrain is something like 'Ai, ai! Vot a game it is!' at
the top of their voices.
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