Leaves from a Field Note-Book eBook

John Hartman Morgan
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 234 pages of information about Leaves from a Field Note-Book.

Leaves from a Field Note-Book eBook

John Hartman Morgan
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 234 pages of information about Leaves from a Field Note-Book.
the ruin and tribulation around her.  And we knew that while we gazed the roads from the doomed city to Locre and Poperinghe were choked with a terror-stricken stream of fugitives, ancient men hobbling upon sticks, aged women clutching copper pans, and stumbling under the weight of feather-beds, while whimpering children fumbled among their mothers’ skirts.  What convulsive eddies each of the shells, whose trajectory we heard ever and anon in the skies overhead, were making in that living stream were to us a subject of poignant speculation.

But as I looked immediately around me I found it ever more difficult to believe that such things were being done upon the earth.  The carpenter went on hammering, stopping but for a moment to shade his eyes with his hand and gaze out over the plain, the peasants in the field continued to hoe, a woman came out of a cottage with a child clinging to her skirts, and said, “La guerre, quand finira-t-elle, M’sieu’?” From far above us the song of the lark, now lost to sight in the aerial blue, floated down upon the drowsy air.

XXV

THE DAY’S WORK

It was dinner hour in the Mess.  There were some dozen of us all told—­the Camp Commandant, the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General, the Assistant-Provost-Marshal, the Assistant-Director of Medical Services, the Sanitary Colonel (which adjective has nothing to do with his personal habits), the Judge-Advocate, two men of the Intelligence, a padre, and myself.  Most of us were known by our initials—­our official initials—­for the use of them saves time and avoids pomposity.  Our duties were both extensive and peculiar, as will presently appear, for we were in the habit of talking shop.  There was, indeed, little else to talk about.  When you are billeted in a small town in Flanders with no amusements and few amenities—­neither theatres, nor sport, nor books—­and with little prospect of getting a move on, you can but chronicle the small beer of your quotidian adventures.  And these be engaging enough at times.

As we sat down to the stew which our orderly had compounded with the assistance of the ingenious Mr. Maconochie, the Camp Commandant sighed heavily.  “I am a kind of receptacle for the waste products of everybody’s mind,” he exclaimed petulantly.  “This morning I was rung up on the telephone and asked if I would bury a dead horse for the Canadian Division; I told them I hadn’t a Prayer Book and it couldn’t be done.  Then two nuns called and asked me to find a discreet soldier—­un soldat discret—­to escort them to Hazebrouck; I told them to take my servant, who is a married man with five children.  Then an old lady sent round to ask me to come and drown her cat’s kittens; I said it was impossible, as she hadn’t complied with the Notification of Births Act.”

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Leaves from a Field Note-Book from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.