The news of this change was greeted with little enthusiasm by the old soldiers in our midst, but old soldiers are invariably pessimists, and imagine that every inspection is the prelude to more "dirty work at the cross-roads" and that every change made in their dispositions is for the worst.
Still, we were all sorry to leave Bailleul, with its bright little shops, and to say good-bye to the curé and our other friends there.
We fell in at night in the Grande Place—the little square that has probably seen more British troops come and go than any other town in northern France—and waited there for the battalion to form up. It was a beautiful summer night, the square tower of the cathedral and the Moorish spire of the Hôtel de Ville forming perfect silhouettes against the starlit sky.
We were not kept waiting long; the shrill of a whistle from somewhere in the darkness put an end to all talking, and we hastily slung our packs on our shoulders again and started on our long tramp south to La Bassée.
For a while our route lay through country that some of us had traversed before, and Merville, Vieux Berquin, and other places were hailed with delight. There is a certain charm in returning to places that one has never expected to see again. Much speculation began as to whether we were going back to our old trenches at Bois Grenier and Fleurbaix or not, but all hopes of this happening were dashed to pieces when, after passing through Neuf Berquin, we turned sharply to the right.
After this disappointment our packs began to weigh more heavily; the mouth organs and vocalists were less persistent in their efforts and gradually stopped in disgust, and only an accordion, wielded by a husky Scotchman at the rear of the company, strove to cheer us up. It was probably "Lochaber no more" or some other dirge he was playing, as he always showed unnatural fondness for the weird and the sad—probably due to the difficulty of fingering lively airs while on the march.
Passing through Merville, A——, who was marching beside me, regained his spirits sufficiently to point out a shop where a pretty girl sold champagne, and then relapsed into silence again.
A little further along the road we saw the adjutant riding alongside the major, and we knew we were nearing our billets. We turned up a side-road through Calonne, and the companies again broke off in different directions to the various farms to which they had been allotted.
We were again fortunate in getting very good accommodation—good airy barns, a mill-pond for washing, and a well of no-worse-than-the-ordinary water. But imagine our surprise to find chalked on the gate of the largest and best farm a sign:—
"SMALL POX.
BY ORDER."