Home again! The base softened its heart on the very morning on which I
had practically decided to attend a parade next day if I were called in
time, and released me with an enormous command to conduct to the War. I
told the senior N.C.O. at the station of entrainment that I would regard
him as personally responsible if he dropped any of the men on the line
or under the engine on the way up, and was just off to look for food
when the R.T.O. told me the train was due out in two minutes. After
making quite sure that he wasn't a Major I reminded him that for that
matter the War had been due to be over last September; also that I had
used some of his trains before and that he couldn't teach me
two-pennyworth about them I hadn't known from childhood. This I said
courteously but firmly, and thereafter felt better and bought eight
boiled eggs, a ham sandwich made so hastily that the ham came to be
altogether omitted, three oranges, and a large mineral-water. The train
was in the station for three-quarters-of-an-hour after I returned. I
passed the time pleasantly by walking up and down in front of the R.T.O.
And now I am here. Glory apart, I could think for a long time without
hitting on anywhere beastlier to be except perhaps just the other side
of a breastwork thirty yards off where the Bosch has been dropping heavy
crumps in threes with monotonous regularity since an indecent hour this
morning. I have been partly asleep, partly waiting for one to drop
thirty yards short. There is no one to talk to except a chaffinch, who
thinks of nothing but his appearance. If I thought of mine I should go
mad. I am wet under and through and over everything--wet, not with rain,
but with mud. You have heard that there is mud in Flanders?
But the worst part really is the number of hours in a day; we have as
many as ten nowadays in which movement is simply not done. Where dawn
finds you, dusk releases you. That is here; I believe we have some real
trenches somewhere behind. But we of the ten hours' stretch run out of
employment early in the morning and remain there the rest of the day. Of
course you can eat--if your rations really came up last night--but not,
I think, continuously for ten hours. A very inferior officer--not I--has
invented a recipe for the ten-hour day which may appeal to some
similarly loose-ended officer. You take an air-pillow and lie with your
gum-booted feet on it till the position becomes intolerable; then you
remove the pillow, sit up and pick the mud off it. When it's clean you
do the same thing again. One tour of this duty will take an hour if you
are conscientious. Its inventor claims that it makes the sun fairly
bustle down the sky.
There are advantages in solitary feeding. Haven't you ever wanted, when
confronted with a lunch tongue, to hack out all the nice tonguey bits
for yourself and leave the bully beef parts to be used for soup or some
other domestic economy? Well, I hack out the tonguey bits every day.
True, I usually have to eat the bully beef parts next meal, but--_à la
guerre comme à la guerre_--I always might have been casualtied between
meals, and then think what a fool I'd feel over my failure to make the
most of the first.
I've come to the conclusion that this Army isn't really fair. Some
regiments I've met always seem to be doing three weeks' rest down
Boulogne or Nice or somewhere like that. Thrice and four times have I
come and come back to this battalion, and every blessed time they've
been either in trenches when I arrived, or situated directly behind the
trenches and going up, it might be, to make some more.
Sometimes we go up to dig, sometimes to carry, sometimes both. On the
night of my re-arrival I went up with the digging party, and have the
honour to report the following conversation between a certain one of our
diggers and a friend who loomed up carrying about four engineer
dug-outs, two coils of barbed wire, and a maul. You could just make out
the man under it all as he stumbled erratically along a mud-ridden
track.
"'Ello, Steve," says the digger, "wot's yer game to-night?"
Steve stopped for a second to look at his interrogator and then observed
genially as he moved on,
"Oh, just killin' time, you know."
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Officer._ "WHY DO YOU THINK HE WOULDN'T MAKE A GOOD
CORPORAL?"
_Sergeant (indicating sentry)._ "_'IM_ A CORPORAL! LOR LUMME! WHY, 'IS
NAME'S CLARENCE!"]
* * * * *