“England at last,” he says. “Thank goodness.”
Women, officers, and men fling off the life-belts they have worn and crowd to the gangways. With shameless eagerness they push their way ashore. The voyage is over.
Along the pier long trains are drawn up waiting for us. We crowd into them; lucky men, or foreseeing men with seats engaged beforehand, fill the Pullman cars of the train which starts first. It runs through the sweet familiar English country incredibly swiftly and smoothly. Luncheon is served to us. On this train, at least, there still are restaurant cars. We eat familiar food and wonder that we ever in the old days grumbled at railway fare. We lie back, satisfied, and smoke.
But there is in us an excitement which even tobacco will not soothe. The train goes swiftly, but not half swiftly enough. We pass town and hamlet. Advertisement hoardings, grotesque flat images of cows, outrageous commendations of whisky or pills, appear in the fields. We are getting near London. Pipes are laid by. We fidget and fret. The houses we pass are closer together, get closer still, merge into a sea of grey-slated roofs. The air is thick, smoke-laden. The train slows down, stops, starts again, draws up finally by the long platform.
Then——! To every man his own dreams of heaven hereafter. To every man his own way of spending his leave.
CHAPTER XVII
A HOLIDAY
Holidays, common enough in civil life, are rare joys in the B.E.F. Leave is obtainable occasionally. But nobody speaks of leave as “holidays.” It is a thing altogether apart. It is almost sacred. It is too thrilling, too rapturous to be compared to anything we knew before the war. We should be guilty of a kind of profanity if we spoke of leave as “holidays.” It ought to have a picturesque and impressive name of its own; but no one has found or even attempted to find an adequate name for it. If we were pagans instead of professing to be Christians, if we danced round fountains and set up statues of Pan for our worship and knew nothing of the Hebrew spirit, we might get a name for “leave” out of the vocabulary of our religious life. Being what we are we cannot do that, but we rightly decline to compare leave with ordinary holidays.