“Now, we’re comin’ to business,” said Corporal Sandercock. “That’s what the O.C. told me—­Captain Whybro, commandin’ Number 4 Works Company, Cornwall Fortress Royal Engineers.  ’Here’s where we carry our first trench,’ says he; ‘an’ here, if wit o’ man can grasp the why or the wherefore,’ says he, ‘is a filthy potato-patch lyin’ slap across our line.  Corporal,’ says he to me, ’you’re a family man an’ tactful.  I detach you,’ says he, ‘to search the blighter out an’ request him to lift his crop without delay.  If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,’ says he, ‘an’ the more you run around the better it’ll be for your figure, an’ the more you’ll thank me,’ he winds up, ‘when we march together into Berlin.’  So now you understand how welcome you dropped in. . . .  ’Tis a terribly hilly country hereabouts.”

“If there’s law in England,” Nicky-Nan threatened, “you’ll keep clear o’ this here patch o’ mine, or it’ll be the worse for ’ee!”

Corporal Sandercock seated himself leisurably on a hillock of thyme, began to knock out his pipe against the edge of his boot-sole, and suddenly exploded in laughter so violent that he was forced to hold his sides.  The exhibition took Nicky-Nan right aback.  He could but stand and stare.

“Oh, oh!” panted the corporal.  After another paroxysm he gasped, “You’ll excuse me, but that’s how I get taken.  ’You’ve got no business here’ was your words.” (Another paroxysm.) “You can’t think how comical you said it, either.”

“Comical or not, I mean it,” Nicky-Nan assured him, with a saturnine frown.  “If you can give over holdin’ your belly an’ listen, I don’t mind tellin’ you my opinion o’ this here War; which is, that ’tis a put-up job from start to finish, with no other object than to annoy folks.”

The corporal sat up, wiping his eyes.  “That’s a point o’ voo,” he admitted, and added guardedly, “I don’t say as I agree:  but I’d like to know how, comin’ upon all of us so suddent, it strikes a man like you, dwellin’ in these out-o’-the-way parts.  My wife declares she’ve seen matters workin’ up to it for years.”

“I never thought about it, one way or t’other, an’ I don’t want to think about it now.  Who in the world wants war?  Not I, for one.”

“Me either, if it comes to that,” Corporal Sandercock allowed, refilling his pipe.  “If the matter had rested with me, I’d ha’ gone on forming fours every Wednesday an’ Saturday, contented enough, all the rest o’ my life.  But the great ones of earth will have it, the Kaiser especially:  and, after that, there’s no more to say.  The Kaiser wants a place in the sun, as he puts it; an’ ’tis our bounden duty as true Britons to see he don’t get any such thing.”

“I never heard tell as he expressed a hankerin’ for my ’taty-patch,” answered Nicky Nan sourly.  “The way I look at it is, he leaves me alone in quiet, an’ you don’t.  A pack o’ sojers messin’ about a spot like this!” he added with scorn.  “It affronts a decent man’s understandin’.  But ‘tis always the same wi’ sojers.  In the Navy, when I belonged it, we had a sayin’—­’A messmate afore a ship-mate, a ship mate afore a dog, an’ a dog afore a sojer.’”