III. Evening
As I walked up the garden path a few minutes before seven, I had to pass the kitchen door, where the servants slept, lived, and cooked our meals. I had a vision of Private Watson, the cook, busy at the oven; he was in his shirt-sleeves, hair untidy, trousers very grimy, and altogether a very unmartial figure. There seemed to be a dispute in progress, to judge from the high pitch to which the voices had attained. On these occasions Lewis’ piping voice reached an incredible falsetto, while his face flushed redder than ever.
Watson, Owen’s servant, had superseded Gray as officers’ mess cook; the latter had, unfortunately, drunk one or two glasses of beer last time in billets, and, to give his own version, he “somehow felt very sleepy, and went down and lay under a bank,” and could remember nothing more until about ten o’clock, when he humbly reported his return to me. Meanwhile Watson had cooked the dinner, which was, of course, very late; and as he did it very well, and as Gray’s explanation seemed somewhat vague, we decided to make Watson cook, let Gray try a little work in the company for a change, and get the sergeant-major to send Owen another man for servant. Watson had signalised the entry to his new appointment by a quarrel with Madame (the Warwicks had managed to “bag” this ideal billet of ours temporarily, and we were in a much less comfortable one the last two occasions out of trenches); eventually Madame had hurled the frying-pan at him, amid a torrent of unintelligible French; neither could understand a word the other was saying, of course. Gray had been wont, I believe, to “lie low and say nuffin,” like Brer Fox, when Madame, who was old and half-crazed, came up and threw water on the fire in a fit of unknown anger. But Watson’s blood boiled at such insults from a Frenchwoman, and hence had followed a sharp contention ending in the projection of the frying-pan. Luckily, we were unmolested here: Watson could manage the dinner, anyway.
I entered our mess-room, which was large, light, and boasted a boarded floor; it was a splendid summer-room, though it would have been very cold in winter. There I found a pile of literature awaiting me; operation orders for to-morrow, giving the hour at which each company was to leave Morlancourt, and which company of the Manchesters it was to relieve, and when, and where, and the route to be taken; there were two typed documents “for your information and retention, please,” one relating to prevention of fly-trouble in billets, the other giving a new code of signals and marked “Secret” on the top, and lastly there was Comic Cuts. Leaving the rest, I hastily skimmed through the latter, which contained detailed information of operations carried out, and intelligence gathered on the corps front during the last few days. At first these were intensely interesting, but after seven months they began to pall, and I grew expert at skimming through them rapidly.
Then Jim Potter came in, and Comic Cuts faded into insignificance.
“Here, Owen,” said I, and threw them over to him.
Captain and Quartermaster Jim Potter was the Father of the battalion. He had been in the battalion sixteen years, and had come out with them in 1914; twice the battalion had been decimated, new officers had come and disappeared, commanding officers had become brigadiers and new ones taken their place, but “Old Jim” remained, calm, unaltered, steady as a rock, good-natured, and an utter pessimist. I first introduced him in Chapter I, when I spent the night in his billet prior to my first advent into the trenches. I was a little perturbed then by his pessimism. Now I should have been very alarmed if he had suddenly burst into a fit of optimism.
“Well, Jim,” we said, “how are things going? When’s the war going to end?”
“Oh! not so very long now.” We gaped at this unexpected reply. “Because,” he added, “you know, Bill, it’s the unexpected that always happens in this war. Hullo! You’ve got some pretty pictures, I see.”