"He was playin' snowballs with 'is bloomin' self."
The command to "fall in" dropped the curtain.
In the grey of dusk the shadowy column marched into Leulene.
The Ten Hundred, after an eleven days' "rest" in the icy grip of a winter's wind that clung to Leulene unabating throughout the period, marched away and entrained upon their first portion of journey front-linewards.
Cattle-trucks provide ample novelty, aroma and draughts. Refuse covering the floor is swept by the occupants into a corner heap, but someone has to sleep on it. An open space between a sliding door can comfortably accommodate two with legs dangling over, but invariably has four or more hunched-up, jumbled khaki figures.
These trains never hurry: always twist and turn and double back half-a-dozen times in journeyings from one point to another. Jolting and jarring is unnoticed—you are past noticing anything after the first hour!
Officers have usually the luxury of railway carriages, but the private—
Privates: Individuals who form the large proportion of a Battalion. Their salient duties embrace shining buttons, carrying up officers' rations, dodging parades, scrubbing out sergeants' and officers' mess, squad drill, guards, and C.B., picking up paper near the billets, grousing and growing thin on short rations—during spare moments they are used for fighting.
Detraining at Brandhoek, the Ten Hundred marched to Brake Camp, a rambling collection of huts built in a wood near the main road running between Poperinghe and Ypres, within a short distance of Vlamertynghe.
It was "Pop!" Unchanged, grim and grey, visited day and night by bomb and shell with the ceaseless activity of that Belgian area. A battalion of Worcesters, whom the Normans were relieving, painted a merry picture of the sodden sector.