to do what I say, you shall see your wife, and your kids as well, and all the lot, sure as I see you.’  He tells me, to do it, I’ve only got to go with him at a certain time with a Boche greatcoat and a shako that he’ll have for me.  He’d mix me up in a coal-fatigue in Lens, and we’d go to our house.  I could go and have a look on condition that I laid low and didn’t show myself, and he’d be responsible for the chaps of the fatigue, but there were non-coms. in the house that he wouldn’t answer for—­and, old chap, I agreed!”

“That was serious.”

“Yes, for sure, it was serious.  I decided all at once. without thinking and without wishing to think, seeing I was dazzled with the idea of seeing my people again; and if I got shot afterwards, well, so much the worse—­but give and take.  The supply of law and demand they call it, don’t they?

“My boy, it all went swimmingly.  The only hitch was they had such hard work to find a shako big enough, for, as you know, I’m well off for head.  But even that was fixed up.  They raked me out in the end a lousebox big enough to hold my head.  I’ve already some Boche boots—­those that were Caron’s, you know.  So, behold us setting off in the Boche trenches—­and they’re most damnably like ours—­with these good sorts of Boche comrades, who told me in very good French—­same as I’m speaking—­not to fret myself.

“There was no alarm, nothing.  Getting there came off all right.  Everything went off so sweet and simple that I fancied I must be a defaulting Boche.  We got to Lens at nightfall.  I remember we passed in front of La Perche and went down the Rue du Quatorze-Juillet.  I saw some of the townsfolk walking about in the streets like they do in our quarters.  I didn’t recognize them because of the evening, nor them me, because of the evening too, and because of the seriousness of things.  It was so dark you couldn’t put your finger into your eye when I reached my folk’s garden.

“My heart was going top speed.  I was all trembling from head to foot as if I were only a sort of heart myself.  And I had to hold myself back from carrying on aloud, and in French too, I was so happy and upset.  The Kamarad says to me, ’You go, pass once, then another time, and look in at the door and the window.  Don’t look as if you were looking.  Be careful.’  So I get hold of myself again, and swallow my feelings all at a gulp.  Not a bad sort, that devil, seeing he’d have had a hell of a time if I’d got nailed.

“At our place, you know, same as everywhere in the Pas de Calais, the outside doors of the houses are cut in two.  At the bottom, it’s a sort of barrier, half-way up your body; and above, you might call it a shutter.  So you can shut the bottom half and be one-half private.

“The top half was open, and the room, that’s the dining-room, and the kitchen as well, of course, was lighted up and I heard voices.