"My dear boy," said the doctor, "what would you do if some one stuck a pin into your leg? Well, war and peace have driven more than one spike into the hide of humanity; and of course she howls and dances with the pain. It's just a natural reflex action. Why, they had a fox-trot epidemic just like this after the Black Death in the fourteenth century; only then they called it St. Vitus's dance."
CHAPTER XVI
THE GLORY OF THE GARDEN
"But the Glory of the Garden
Lies in more than meets the eye."
R. Kipling.
A farewell dinner was being given to Aurelle by the officers of the Scottish Division, with whom he had spent four years of danger and hardship.
Before they sat down, they made him drink a cocktail and a glass of sherry, and then an Italian vermouth tuned up with a drop of gin. Their eager affection, and this curiously un-British mixing of drinks, made him feel that on this last evening he was no longer a member of the mess, but its guest.
"I hope," said Colonel Parker, "that
you will be a credit to the education we have given you, and that you will at last manage to empty your bottle of champagne without assistance."
"I'll try," said Aurelle, "but the war has ended too soon, and I've still a lot to learn."
"That's a fact," grumbled the colonel. "This damned peace has come at a most unfortunate moment. Everything was just beginning to get into shape. I had just bought a cinema for the men; our gunners were working better every day; there was a chance of my becoming a general, and Dundas was teaching me jazz. And then the politicians poke their noses in and go and make peace, and Clemenceau demobs Aurelle! Life's just one damned thing after another!"