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-stonewise; we went to and fro,
leaping from box to box as leaps the chamois from Alp to Alp. Should
you miss your leap 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
bed; 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
sleepwalked 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 uphill from the lines. It is the mules laughing.
V