That should have warned me.  Chaucer wasn’t the man to keep a batman who was a fool.

It must have been about 3 A.M. when I was waked by my man helping Chaucer dress.

“What’s the matter?”

“Your fellow says my man’s ill.”

“What is it?”

“I dunno, Sir,” my man said. “’E ‘s groanin’ an’ rollin’ about an’ keepin’ all us others awake.”

When I got to the men’s hut I found Chaucer kneeling beside the sick man, who was holding his head and groaning.  All the other men were sitting up and looking on.  After a minute or two Chaucer got up and beckoned me outside.

“Look here,” he said, “I don’t want to scare you, but suppose that chap’s got anything infectious.  Is there a doctor handy?

“Nowhere nearer than Sailly.”

“Well, Gubson tells me they were expecting the M.O. at our camp today.  He may have stayed the night.  Can you send somebody up to see?”

I sent off an orderly at once, and in half-an-hour a young doctor arrived, and ordered all the other men out of the hut.  Then he pulled a gaudy handkerchief out of his pocket, sprinkled it with some stuff out of a small phial, tied it over his mouth and only then began to fiddle about the sick man, feeling his pulse and sounding him.

Then he got up, readjusted his handkerchief-respirator and mumbled that it was cerebro-spinal-something.  Spotted fever.

We all got out of that hut in double-quick time, believe me.  The doctor was full of orders—­half a hundred things to do at once.  The man must be strictly isolated.  All the contacts—­every blessed man who had been in the hut with him—­must be placed under supervision.  The hut must be put out of bounds.  And when he found half the men had gone under the tarpaulin shelter he put that out of bounds too.

We were a full hour trying to separate the contacts; but when the doctor found the cook getting breakfast ready and heard he had been in the sick man’s hut he threw his hand in.

“I won’t answer for a single one of you,” he said; “the place is no better than a pest-house.  Throw that breakfast away.  It’s sheer poison.  Clear out, all of you.”

It was Chaucer started the panic.  I saw him sneaking away up the slope, so I thought it better to make a move too.  I didn’t ask the doctor where we were to go; he’d have had us all sleeping out on the open grass for a week if I had.  So the whole lot of us, half asleep, trekked back to Ripilly village and turned into our old billets again.

* * * * *

It was my Sergeant-Major who told me next day that Chaucer and his gang had taken possession of the Riviera—­my Riviera.  I went there at once, to find out what it all meant, but they had a sentry at the foot of the slope, who said the camp was infected and no one was allowed there; so I climbed the slopes and looked down from above.  Chaucer was smoking outside my pet hut talking to a couple of his subalterns, and a string of men was lined up beside the field kitchen for tea.  Close by, the batman, recovered from his illness, was putting a fishing-rod together, and one of the subalterns blew his nose on a gaudy handkerchief which I recognised at once.