Our mess was situated on the crest of a ridge, and enjoyed an uninterrupted
view of rolling leagues of mud; it had the appearance of a packing-case
floating on an ocean of ooze.
We and our servants, and our rats and our cockroaches, and our other
bosom-companions slept in tents pitched round and about the mess.
The whole camp was connected with the outer world by a pathway of
ammunition boxes, laid stepping-stone-wise; we went to and fro, lepping
from box to box as leps the chamois from Alp to Alp. Should you miss your
lep there would be a swirl of mud, a gulping noise, and that was the end of
you; your sorrowing comrades shed a little chloride of lime over the spot
where you were last seen, posted you as "Believed missing" and indented for
another Second-Lieutenant (or Field-Marshal, as the case might be).
Our mess was constructed of loosely piled shell boxes, and roofed by a tin
lid. We stole the ingredients box by box, and erected the house with our
own fair hands, so we loved it with parental love; but it had its little
drawbacks. Whenever the field guns in our neighbourhood did any business,
the tin lid rattled madly and the shell boxes jostled each other all over
the place. It was quite possible to leave our mess at peep o'day severely
Gothic in design, and to return at dewy eve to find it rakishly Rococo.
William, our Transport Officer and Mess President, was everlastingly piping
all hands on deck at unseemly hours to save the home and push it back into
shape; we were householders in the fullest sense of the term.
Before the War, William assures us, he was a bright young thing, full of
merry quips and jolly practical jokes, the life and soul of any party, but
what with the contortions of the mess and the vagaries of the transport
mules he had become a saddened man.
Between them--the mules and the mess--he never got a whole night in bod;
either the mules were having bad dreams, sleep-walking into strange lines
and getting themselves abhorred, or the field guns were on the job and the
mess had the jumps. If Hans, the Hun, had not been the perfect little
gentleman he is, and had dropped a shell anywhere near us (instead of
assiduously spraying a distant ridge where nobody ever was, is, or will be)
our mess would have been with Tyre and Sidon; but Hans never forgot himself
for a moment; it was our own side we distrusted. The Heavies, for instance.
The Heavies warped themselves laboriously into position behind our hill,
disguised themselves as gooseberry bushes, and gave an impression of the
crack of doom at 2 A.M. one snowy morning.
Our mess immediately broke out into St. Vitus's dance, and William piped
all hands on deck.
The Skipper, picturesquely clad in boots (gum, high) and a goat's skin,
flung himself on the east wing, and became an animated buttress. Albert
Edward climbed aloft and sat on the tin lid, which was opening and shutting
at every pore. Mactavish put his shoulder to the south wall to keep it from
working round to the north. I clung to the pantry, which was coming adrift
from its parent stem, while William ran about everywhere, giving advice and
falling over things. The mess passed rapidly through every style of
architecture, from a Chinese pagoda to a Swiss châlet, and was on the point
of confusing itself with a Spanish castle when the Heavies switched off
their hate and went to bed. And not a second too soon. Another moment and I
should have dropped the pantry, Albert Edward would have been sea-sick, and
the Skipper would have let the east wing go west.
We pushed the mess back into shape, and went inside it for a peg of
something and a consultation. Next evening William called on the Heavies'
commander and decoyed him up to dine. We regaled him with wassail and
gramophone and explained the situation to him. The Lord of the Heavies, a
charming fellow, nearly burst into tears when he heard of the ill he had
unwittingly done us, and was led home by William at 1.30 A.M., swearing to
withdraw his infernal machines, or beat them into ploughshares, the very
next day. The very next night our mess, without any sort of preliminary
warning, lost its balance, sat down with a crash, and lay littered about a
quarter of an acre of ground. We all turned out and miserably surveyed the
ruins. What had done it? We couldn't guess. The field guns had gone to
bye-bye, the Heavies had gone elsewhere. Hans, the Hun, couldn't have made
a mistake and shelled us? Never! It was a mystery; so we all lifted up our
voices and wailed for William. He was Mess President; it was his fault, of
course.
At that moment William hove out of the night, driving his tent before him
by bashing it with a mallet.
According to William there was one, "Sunny Jim," a morbid transport mule,
inside the tent, providing the motive power. "Sunny Jim" had always been
something of a somnambulist, and this time he had sleep-walked clean
through our mess and on into William's tent, where the mallet woke him up.
He was then making the best of his way home to lines again, expedited by
William and the mallet.
So now we are messless; now we crouch shivering in tents and talk lovingly
of the good old times beneath our good old tin roof-tree, of the wonderful
view of the mud we used to get from our window, and of the homely tune our
shell-boxes used to perform as they jostled together of a stormy night.
And sometimes, as we crouch shivering in our tents, we hear a strange sound
stealing up-hill from the lines. It is the mules laughing.
* * * * *