The others murmured sympathy. “What did you say, Lollie?” asked the Acting-Adjutant.
“I made him jump,” said Lollie, beaming. “I was standing looking for a taxi, and this fellow came alongside and looked me up and down. ‘Your gloves have——,’ he was beginning, when I whipped round on him. ‘Are you speaking to me?’ I snapped. ‘Yessir,’ he said, stuttering a bit. ‘Then what do you mean by not saluting?’ I demanded, and sailed into him, and made him stand to attention while I dressed him down and told him I’d a good mind to report him for insolent and insubordinate behaviour. ‘And, now,’ I finished up, ‘there’s a brigadier-general just crossing the street, and he’s not carrying gloves. Go ’n speak to him about it, and then come back, and I’ll give you my card to report me.’ He sneaked off—and he didn’t go after the general.”
The others laughed and applauded. “Good stroke.” “Rather smart, Lollie.” “It is rather sickening.”
“But as I was saying,” went on Lollie, after another sip at his steaming punch, “it isn’t so much these things make a fellow glad to be back here. It’s because this side really is getting to feel home-like. You know your way about Boulogne, and all the railways, and where they run to and from, better than you do lines in England. I do, anyhow. You know what’s a fair price for things, and what you ought to pay, and you haven’t the faintest idea of that in England. You just pay, and be sure you’re usually swindled if they know you’re from this side. Here you know just the things other people know, and very little more and very little less, and you’re interested in much the same things. Over there you have to sit mum while people talk by the hour about sugar cards and Sinn Fein, and whether there’ll be a new Ministry of Coke and Coal, and, if so, who’ll get the job; and you hear people grouse, and read letters in the papers, about the unfair amusement tax, and they pray hard for pouring rain so it’ll stop the Zepps coming over—not thinking or caring, I suppose, that it will hang up our Push at the same time, or thinking of us in the wet shell-holes—and they get agitated to death because the Minister for Foreign Affairs——” Lollie stopped abruptly and glanced round the table. “Can anybody here tell me who IS the Minister for Foreign Affairs?” he demanded. There was a dead silence for a moment and an uneasy shuffle. Then the Padre cleared his throat and began, slowly, “Ha, I think it is——”
Lollie interrupted. “There you are!” he said triumphantly. “None of you know, and you only think, Padre. Just what I’m saying. We don’t know the things they know over there, and, what’s more, don’t care a rush about ’em.”
“There’s a good deal in what you say, Lollie,” said the C.O. “But, after all, Home’s Home to me.”
“I know, sir,” said the Second. “So it is to me.”
But Lollie fairly had the bit between his teeth, although, perhaps, the rum punch was helping. “Well, I find this side gets more and more home to me. Over there you keep reading and hearing about the pacifist danger, and every other day there are strikes and rumours of strikes, either for more money or because of food shortage—makes one wonder what some of ’em would say to our fellows’ bob a day or twenty-four hours living on a bully and biscuit iron ration. I tell you at the end of ten days over there you begin to think we’ve lost the blessed war and that it’d serve some of ’em right if we did. Here we’re only interested in real things and real men. There’s hardly a man I know in England now—and probably you’re the same if you stop to think. And I come back here and drop into a smooth little routine, and people I like, and a job I know, and talk and ways I’m perfectly familiar with and at home in—that’s the only word, at home in.”
“Bully beef and bullets and Stand To at dawn,” murmured the Acting-Adjutant. “There were two men reported killed in the trench to-night.”
“And they might have been killed by a taxi in the Strand if they’d been there,” retorted Lollie.