“I wonder!” said Colonel Kemp reflectively.  He was thinking of his wife and four children in distant Argyllshire.

But the rapt attitude and quickened breath of Temporary Captain Bobby Little endorsed every word that Major Wagstaffe had spoken.  As he rolled into his “flea-bag” that night, Bobby requoted to himself, for the hundredth time, a passage from Shakespeare which had recently come to his notice.  He was not a Shakespearian scholar, nor indeed a student of literature at all; but these lines had been sent to him, cut out of a daily almanac, by an equally unlettered and very adorable confidante at home:—­

  “And gentlemen in England now a-bed,
  Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
  And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
  That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!”

Bobby was the sort of person who would thoroughly have enjoyed the Battle of Agincourt.

VIII

“THE NON-COMBATANT”

I

We will call the village St. Gregoire.  That is not its real name; because the one thing you must not do in war-time is to call a thing by its real name.  To take a hackneyed example, you do not call a spade a spade:  you refer to it, officially, as Shovels, General Service, One.  This helps to deceive, and ultimately to surprise, the enemy; and as we all know by this time, surprise is the essence of successful warfare.  On the same principle, if your troops are forced back from their front-line trenches, you call this “successfully straightening out an awkward salient.”

But this by the way.  Let us get back to St. Gregoire.  Hither, mud-splashed, ragged, hollow-cheeked, came our battalion—­they call us the Seventh Hairy Jocks nowadays—­after four months’ continuous employment in the firing-line.  Ypres was a household word to them; Plugstreet was familiar ground; Givenchy they knew intimately; Loos was their wash-pot—­or rather, a collection of wash-pots, for in winter all the shell-craters are full to overflowing.  In addition to their prolonged and strenuous labours in the trenches, the Hairy Jocks had taken part in a Push—­a part not altogether unattended with glory, but prolific in casualties.  They had not been “pulled out” to rest and refit for over six months, for Divisions on the Western Front were not at that period too numerous, the voluntary system being at its last gasp, while the legions of Lord Derby had not yet crystallised out of the ocean of public talk which held them in solution.  So the Seventh Hairy Jocks were bone tired.  But they were as hard as a rigorous winter in the open could make them, and—­they were going back to rest at last.  Had not their beloved C.O. told them so?  And he had added, in a voice not altogether free from emotion, that if ever men deserved a solid rest and a good time, “you boys do!”