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