When we got out of our
sleeping bags that morning there was nothing in sight but miles and
miles of rolling waves of snow, seven thousand feet up on a windy
plateau, with glaciers full of crevasses shutting us off from the sea,
and not a living thing in sight as far as the eye could reach.
"We were six in company and none of us were too good for Paradise, and
one--he was an old Wapping sailor, we called him Treacle--had the name
of being a shocking old rip ashore. But we remembered what day it was,
and we wanted to feel that we weren't cut off entirely from the world of
Christian men--our brothers and sisters who would be going to church at
home. So I dug out my little prayer-book that my mother put in my kit
going away, and we all stood round bare-headed in the snow--a shaggy old
lot I can tell you, with chins that hadn't seen a razor for a month--and
I read the prayers for the day, the first and second Vespers, and
Laudate Dominum and then the De Profundis.
"I think we felt better doing that, but they say the comical and the
tragical are always chasing each other, which can get in first, and it
was so with us, for just as I had got to an end with the solemn words,
'Out of the depths we cry unto thee, O Lord, Lord hear our cry,' in
jumps old Treacle in his thickest cockney, 'And Gawd bless our pore ole
wives and sweethearts fur a-wye.
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