The god who guards lovers intervened the next day by the simple means of a scrap of paper asking for a man from the regiment, mechanic by trade, to look after a machine at P—— for disinfecting clothes. P—— was a pretty little town at least eight miles from the front line, rather deserted by the inhabitants on account of marmites, but all the same a safe and comfortable retreat for a troglodyte of the trenches.
0275 Private Scott, mechanic by trade, put his name down. His lieutenant abused him; his colonel recommended him; and his general nominated him. An old London omnibus painted a military grey took him away to his new life, far from Warburton and his perils.
The machine which Scott had to look after was in the yard of a college, an old building covered with ivy; and Abbé Hoboken, the principal, received him, when he arrived, as if he were a general.
"Are you a Catholic, my son?" he asked him in the English of the college.
Luckily for Scott, he did not understand, and answered vaguely:
"Yes, sir."
This involuntary renunciation of the Scotch Presbyterian Church procured him a room belonging to a mobilized Belgian professor and a bed with sheets.
Now, at that very moment, Hauptmann Reineker, who commanded a German battery of heavy artillery at Paschendaele, was in a very bad temper.
The evening post had brought him an ambiguous letter from his wife in which she mentioned too often, and with an affectation of indifference, a wounded officer of the Guards, whom she had been nursing for several days.
During the night, he surveyed his gun-emplacements on the outskirts of a wood, then he said suddenly: