expected to see him back. He rejoined us suddenly in the spring. He’s come back to die; we all know that. By this time next year, if he can contrive it bravely, he won’t be listening for Suzette or any girl.
V
THE officer who’s going to relieve me has just arrived and gone forward to battalion headquarters with one of my linesmen. He’s poking round the Front just at present; as soon as he comes back, he’ll take over from me and I shall report to my Major at the guns.
T
Queer, the places men go to in this war and the circumstances under which they meet! This chap went to school with me in London, I discover. I remember him chiefly by one of those inconsequential incidents of childhood; he had a hoydenish sister who laid me out by throwing a snowball with a stone in it. She’s a married woman with children now—the wife of one of the props of the upper-middle-classes.
Her husband has a seat in Parliament; before the war she owned a Rolls Royce and everything else that was respectable. She’s been going up in the social scale ever since she threw that snowball. It’s by the snowball that she recalls me, her brother tells me, whenever my name is mentioned.
This chap’s been to the east; he was present at the taking of Bagdad. He speaks of all that magic country as though it were just as commonplace as this desolate plain of ruined villages on which I gaze.
Tonight we pull our guns out. Where we’re going nobody knows. Our infantry are already marching out in sections and the Imperials are taking over from us. Staff officers with their red tabs go up and down the trenches. Brass-hats pass down the sunken road and pop their heads in at my observation post to enquire their direction. There’s mystery and excitement in the air. They can’t be withdrawing us for a third time merely to go into training. It must be for the counter-stroke which we have so long expected. But when are we going to strike and where?
I’d like to see our Captain at this moment. The whole impatience of our corps through this summer seems to be summed up in his person. Like all of us, only
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