I said good-bye to Adams, my servant. No man was ever
more fortunate in his batmen--Adams, a typical regular, fiercely proud
of his regiment; Campion, the London Territorial, a commercial traveller
in civil life; and Munro, the Royal Scot, who within a month or two of
the outbreak of war could no longer suppress the fighting spirit of the
Royal Regiment stirring within him, and voluntarily rejoined, leaving a
wife and six children behind him. He was a foreman in the Edinburgh
Tramways Company. Handy man that he was, he could turn his hand to
anything, whether it was devising a ferrule for a broken walking stick
out of the screw of a pickle bottle, or making a bleak-looking hut
habitable, or producing hot tea from nowhere, or transforming a
wet-canteen marquee into a decent place for Communion (empty tobacco
boxes for table, beer barrels discreetly out of sight), or building a
pulpit out of sandbags in the corner of a roofless saloon bar.
The supply train left at a very early hour, and by devious routes
reluctantly approached the railhead. The journey took thirty hours. It
was long enough to teach the lessons never to go on a military train in
France without something to read, or to drink rashly from an aluminium
cup containing hot liquid, or to rely on bully beef as a sole article of
diet.
Pages:
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28