"Leave, I'm afraid," remarked the Adjutant, standing with his back to the
fire and hitching his bath towel more securely over his left shoulder, "can
only be granted now in special circumstances."
Flying being prevented for that afternoon by the weather conditions, we had
been playing hockey, and the Adjutant, who by virtue of seniority had just
had first go at the bathroom, was in a warm and expansive mood. The rest of
us sat about in his quarters awaiting our turns at a hot-water supply that
would certainly cease to have anything warming or expansive about it by the
time it reached the junior Second Lieutenant.
"The question is," said that dejected officer, fixing the Adjutant with a
watchful eye--"the question is, what are you going to regard as special
circumstances?"
"You state your circumstances to me officially to-morrow," said the
Adjutant cheerfully, "and I'll tell you quickly enough whether they're
special or not,"
"I suppose," suggested the Stunt Pilot, "that a wedding would be a pretty
special sort of circumstance, wouldn't it?"
"That depends," replied the Adjutant. "Are you thinking of getting married
yourself?"
The Stunt Pilot said that he hadn't been, but if there was any leave going
with it he might think of it.
"One's simply got to get leave _somehow_," he complained. "What about a
breach of promise case? Suppose I manage to get mixed up in a breach of
promise case, wouldn't that do?"
"That's no good," commented the Junior Officer gloomily. "You'd have to get
leave for something else first before you could manage it."
"And if you did," added the Adjutant severely, "you'd get leave for rather
longer than you bargained for."
"How about funerals?" put in the Equipment Officer hopefully. "Funerals are
a fairly sound stunt, aren't they?"
"Funerals," observed the Adjutant, "are played out. If you come to me
to-morrow and talk about dead uncles and things I shall have all sorts of
inquiries made that will surprise you. I've been had before by funerals.
When I was in the Army"--the Adjutant talks like this since he was attached
to the Flying Corps--"when I was in the Army there was a fellow who used to
come to the orderly-room and talk funerals to me until I was sick of the
sight of him. After some months of it I made him give me a written list of
all his surviving relations, and then as he killed them off I used to
scratch them out. I caught him at last on his third grandmother."
"That's all very nice," said the Stunt Pilot, "but the question at present
before the meeting is how are we poor beggars to get any leave?"
"It's no good blaming me," returned the Adjutant blandly. "Command Orders
are Command Orders."
There was a brief silence, and then the Stunt Pilot lifted up his voice and
spoke eloquently about the War Office and Brass Hats generally. He said
that they had hearts of granite and were strangers to all loving-kindness.
Their days were spent in idleness in the Metropolis (so said the Stunt
Pilot), while he and his fellows drove rotten 'buses for hours together
over the beastliest district in Europe. Of an evening the Carlton and the
Piccadilly, the Bing Boys and the Bing Girls, all the delights of London
were ready to their hands, while poor devils like himself, shorn of leave,
were condemned to languish in a moth-eaten Mess in the society of such
people as the Adjutant. Where was the sense in it, where the justice, and
when the deuce were they, any of them, going to get a chance at the
bath-room?
The Adjutant regarded him with amused pity.
"The fact of it is," he observed, "you people have been absolutely spoilt
over leave. When I was in the Infantry we used to consider three or four
days in six months quite handsome."
The Stunt Pilot inquired sarcastically whether he meant three or four days'
work or three or four days' leave.
"I don't mind saying," pursued the Adjutant, ignoring this sally, "at the
risk of making myself unpopular, that personally I think it's a very good
thing that leave _has_ been cut down. My own opinion is that in the past
there's been a lot too much leave flying about. Running up and down to
London on leave isn't going to help beat the Germans. What we've got to do
if we want to win this War is to--"
At this moment the C.O. entered and put down a hockey-stick in the corner.
"Thanks for the stick, Jervis," he said, and turned to go. "By the way,
shall I see you at the orderly-room tomorrow before you go? What train are
you catching?"
The Adjutant hesitated for the fraction of a second.
"Well, Sir," he said, "I thought of taking the 9.5."
"I see," said the C.O. "Right-o. You won't be away longer than forty-eight
hours, I suppose?"
"Oh, no," said the Adjutant. "That'll do well, Sir."
A brief astonished silence followed the C.O.'s departure, a silence broken
by the excited tones of the Stunt Pilot.
"The 9.5?" he cried. "Are you going to _London_?"
The Adjutant lit a cigarette with some deliberation.
"Only just for forty-eight hours," he remarked.
"Forty-eight hours!" gasped the indignant Pilot; then, raising his voice to
surmount the din, "Forty-eight hours' leave in London, and you've just been
pouring out hot air about--"
"_Leave?_" interrupted the Adjutant, in pained surprise. "What d'you mean
by leave? I'm going on _duty_."
A chorus of derisive laughter greeted the announcement. "Duty?" echoed the
Stunt Pilot bitterly. "_What_ duty?"
The Adjutant took another furl in his bath-towel.
"If you really must know," he said composedly, "I'm going to buy a
vacuum-cleaner for the Mess."
"You infernal old wangler!" cried the outraged Pilot, when at last he was
able to make himself heard. "Of course it takes forty-eight hours to buy a
vacuum-cleaner, doesn't it?"
"As a matter of fact," said the Adjutant solemnly, "my whole experience of
vacuum-cleaners leads me to the conviction that you have to look at a great
many of them before you can pick a really good one." He glanced round for
his clothes. "And now if you fellows will get on with your baths, I've got
an air mechanic coming in a minute or two to cut my hair. I expect I shall
be far too busy in town for the next two days to have any time to waste on
barbers."
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Farmer_ (_to "land-lady"_). "HI, MISSIE, WHAT BE YE DOIN'
WI TRACE-HORSE BEHIND, AND A LOAD LIKE THAT?"
"_Land-lady._" "OH, WELL, YOU SEE, WHEN HE WAS IN FRONT HE WAS ALWAYS
TURNING ROUND WRONG WAY ON, SO I JUST PUT HIM BEHIND TO HELP UP HILLS, LIKE
THE RAILWAY ENGINES."]
* * * * *