"However," he concluded, "you'll have no excuse if you turn up to-morrow dirty. Sergeant Oliver has got some baths going in the back yard of the 'Rayon d'Or' in Aberfeldy Street; and you'll go down there by sections, beginning at ten o'clock. And I'll hold a dam' strict inspection at half-past three—so look out!" In due course, Corporal Greenstock paraded his section, containing Privates Higgins and Grant, and marched it down Dunoon Street, through Piccadilly[Pg 88] Circus into Aberfeldy Street. There in a cloud of steam they found Sergeant Oliver, whose military career at the front was divided between improvising baths for the battalion when it came out of the line, and supplying facilities for the drying of socks when in it. The bath on this occasion was an enormous wooden tub, capable of holding four men at a time. The sergeant and his satellites were busy keeping a veritable furnace going beneath a boiler which several gloomy defaulters constantly refilled from a well nearby. One clean fill of water was the allowance for each section, and by the time the water was emptied out it had become only less thick than the mud of the trenches they had just left. [Pg 88] The whole arrangement reflected the greatest credit on Sergeant Oliver, considering that when he had arrived at the "Rayon d'Or" neither tub nor boiler had been there. Whence and by whose permission they had been procured were questions which the colonel had carefully refrained from asking. But the sybaritic soul of Bill Grant clamored for something better still. He drew Alf on one side and whispered. Alf shook his head. Bill became more earnest; Higgins hesitated—and was lost. Both men slipped quietly out of the bath-house while Corporal Greenstock, taking the best of the water by right of seniority, was performing his ablutions. It was a very quiet village, sparsely inhabited. Alf and Bill soon found a large farmyard in which, remote from public view, stood a dilapidated barn. [Pg 89] [Pg 89] "This'll do fine!" said Bill. "There's nobody living in the 'ouse—we'll be as safe as the Pay Corps 'ere." "I don't know," objected Alf. "What about that 'aystack in the loft? That must belong to some one."
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