"Anything you like, sir," said Aurelle, "except 'Caruso.'"
"Why?" said the colonel. "It's a very good record, it cost twenty-two shillings. But first of all you must hear my dear Mrs. Finzi-Magrini in 'La Tosca.' Doctor, please regulate it, I can't see very well—Speed 61. Don't scratch the record, for God's sake!"
He sank down on his biscuit boxes, arranged his back comfortably against a heap of sacks, and shut his eyes. His rugged face relaxed. The padre and the doctor were playing chess, and Major Parker was filling in long returns for brigade headquarters. Over a little wood, torn to bits by shells, an aeroplane was sailing home among fleecy white clouds in a lovely pale-green sky. Aurelle began a letter.
"Padre," said the doctor, "if you are going to the division to-morrow, ask them to send me some blankets for our dead Boches. You saw the one we buried this morning? The rats had half eaten him. It's indecent. Check to the king."
"Yes," said the padre, "and it's curious how they always begin at the nose!"
Over their heads a heavy English battery began to bombard the German line. The padre smiled broadly.
"There'll be dirty work at the cross roads to-night," he remarked with satisfaction.
"Padre," said the doctor, "are you not the minister of a religion of peace and love?"
"The Master said, my boy, that one must love one's fellow-man. He never said that we must love Germans. I take your knight."
The Reverend John MacIvor, an old military chaplain, with a face bronzed by Eastern suns, took to this life of war and horrors with the enthusiasm of a child. When the men were in the trenches he visited them every morning with his pockets bulging with hymn-books and packets of cigarettes. While resting behind the lines, he tried his hand at bombing and deplored the fact that his cloth forbade him human targets.