For the rest, the Quartermaster supplies her with necessities and blankets. Of late she has taken to wearing a Tommy’s tunic and a khaki shirt.
Suzette has become an institution; the Colonel and General are aware of her; they both wink at her presence. They may well, for she keeps our men straight; there’s been no drunkenness since she came among us. She’ll be the last woman to be seen by many of our chaps; the casualties in our counter-offensive are bound to be heavy.
What I’m wondering is will she be allowed to accompany us if we go into open warfare; we can scarcely have a woman with us then. I’d bet the shirt off my back, however, that the Captain will manage it. He never speaks to her or of her—never seems to notice her; but if you watch him closely, you know that he listens for her laughter and her footstep. He’s a man to whom something shattering has happened—something not done by shells. He was badly wounded last year at Vimy; we none of us expected to see him back. He rejoined us suddenly in the spring. He’s come back to die; we all know that. By this time next year, if he can contrive it bravely, he won’t be listening for Suzette or any girl.
V
THE officer who’s going to relieve me has just arrived and gone forward to battalion headquarters with one of my linesmen. He’s poking round the Front just at present; as soon as he comes back, he’ll take over from me and I shall report to my Major at the guns.
Queer, the places men go to in this war and the circumstances under which they meet! This chap went to school with me in London, I discover. I remember him chiefly by one of those inconsequential incidents of childhood; he had a hoydenish sister who laid me out by throwing a snowball with a stone in it. She’s a married woman with children now—the wife of one of the props of the upper-middle-classes.
Her husband has a seat in Parliament; before the war she owned a Rolls Royce and everything else that was respectable. She’s been going up in the social scale ever since she threw that snowball. It’s by the snowball that she recalls me, her brother tells me, whenever my name is mentioned.
This chap’s been to the east; he was present at the taking of Bagdad. He speaks of all that magic country as though it were just as commonplace as this desolate plain of ruined villages on which I gaze.