"Ain't got none. Only asked if you WANT a-a drop...." He moved away and from far down the street his dirge carried faintly:
"There's whiskers on the pork
We curl 'em with a fork—."
In unhappy contract to Christmas. New Year proved to be a day of short rations, bully beef and a rehearsal of an attack in the snow. The bread ration dwindled down to Winkleian proportions.
A move up the line was pending in the near future and rumours that of all hellish sectors they were going up the Passchendaele-Ypres areas, were received with continuous outbursts of growling.
The young Staffords who had not the gruesome knowledge of Belgian desolation were satisfied with a front anywhere near the magic Ypres. They wanted to see the place where, as one of them was perpertually saying. "A couple of Blighty regiments made a bloomin' 'ell of a mess of the whole blooming' Jerry army."
There was everywhere a mutual recognition of a possible, a probable, German attack on a scale to date unparalleled. Every battalion in the Brigade was thoroughly cognisant that at some time during the next few months they would be called upon to make another Cambrai stand. There was a general feeling that he would attempt to crush the British Army at a blow, seize the Channel ports, and thus isolate what armies had escaped the first onslaught.
XI
DECEMBER-JANUARY, 1918
LEULENE—BRANDHOEK—YPRES
January 3.—Snow had, after three weeks on the ground beneath the hardening influence of a temperature several degrees below zero, evolved into a surface upon which a constant steady balance demanded no little skill. Marching encumbered with a full pack, clumsy Army-shod feet, one arm only free for a much hampered swing, increased the difficulties of maintaining a secure foothold.
(Full pack: A conglomeration of articles intended in normal ages to be transported by two mules, but under the influence of advanced civilisation strapped on the back of one man, in addition to a rifle, half a dozen Mills' bombs, a Lewis-gun, spade or shovel, sheet of corrugated iron, or any other article that can be somewhere hung upon him).